Lake Tahoe Dam

California

A Russian-born engineer once tried to drain Lake Tahoe's outflow all the way to San Francisco.

engineeringhistoricalnatural

In the early 1860s an engineer named Alexis Waldemar Von Schmidt started buying up land around Tahoe and Truckee. He was Russian born, based in San Francisco, and he wanted to send Lake Tahoe's water west to the city through an aqueduct. He founded a company for it in 1865. The California Legislature shut him down in 1870. Instead the legislature handed the right to dam Tahoe's outlet to a lumber company owned by Mark Hopkins and Leland Stanford, and a small dam of lumber and rocks went up. Von Schmidt kept going anyway. He pitched San Francisco's Board of Supervisors on channeling the Truckee River into Squaw Valley, then down the North Fork of the American River, then through an aqueduct to the city. Ten million dollars at the time, roughly two hundred million today. The supervisors approved it. The mayor killed it, worried about the lawsuits over water rights that would land on him.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
In the early 1860s, Russian born and San Francisco based engineer Alexis Waldemar Von Schmidt bought a large amount of land in the Tahoe-Truckee area with the hope of sending water westward to San Francisco via an aqueduct.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Ed Z'berg Sugar Pine Point State Park 7.7 mi The cross-country skiing and biathlon events of the 1960 Winter Olympics were held in what is now this park.
  • Donner Memorial State Park 11.8 mi The pedestal under the pioneer statue at Donner is twenty-two feet tall because that was the depth of the snow.
  • Sugar Bowl Ski Resort 14 mi Goofy's famous holler started as an Austrian ski champion's yodel on these slopes.
  • Wilbur D. May Center 31.2 mi A department store heir brought home a shrunken head from South America, and it sits in a Reno museum.
  • Maybert, California 32.4 mi To get rid of squatters, the Forest Service burned the last cabins of Maybert to the ground.
  • Remington Hill, California 35.6 mi A man who helped build the ditches here made a million dollars, lost every cent, and died in the poorhouse.