The builders
Cheesman Dam was born from the vision of leading residents of a new-born town on the high plains. It was an investment in the future, water for unborn generations. In the evolution of its design, it reflected revolutionary ideas of the best engineering minds of the time. The efforts of hundreds of anonymous workers turned that vision and those revolutionary ideas into an architectural wonder.
Walter S. Cheesman was the person most responsible for the early-day consolidation and expansion of Denver Water’s system, as the head of four successive water supply companies between 1872 and 1907. Cheesman insisted on keeping the water company "a Denver enterprise" with no outside investors. The company never paid a dividend to stockholders. Instead, the money went back into the system.
David H. Moffat, one of the great builders of Denver, partnered with Cheesman in an attempt to get transcontinental rail service to the city in addition to water works. After Cheesman's death, David Moffat handled the sale of the company to the city in 1918.
The engineers
More than a half-dozen engineers had a hand in the design of Cheesman Dam. In the 1890s, C. P. Allen was the chief engineer who found the site and began the early work. L. E. Cooley designed the original gravity dam that was swept away by the flood of 1900, and then assisted Charles L. Harrison in the design of the final dam. By the time the water crossed the spillway in 1905, Harrison had moved on and two other engineers, A. E. Kastl and G. T. Prince, supervised the completion of the dam.
Internationally respected hydrological engineer James D. Schuyler consulted with the primary engineers for 10 years, offering encouragement and refinements. Alfred Noble, a past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, decided to raise the dam's spillway height to 212 feet, a design change that improved the overall storage capacity with little addition effort.
As the work neared completion, the monumental undertaking was the subject of a paper in the 1904 Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Engineers Charles L. Harrison and Silas H. Woodard co-authored the analysis of the design and construction. The debate over the design filled most of the journal.
The workers
Hundreds of people – contractors, laborers, engineers and support staff – helped build Cheesman Dam. Most of their names are lost. The majority of them were day laborers hired off the streets of Denver. A small but special group was a team of stone masons brought over from Italy to do the finishing work on the exterior faces.
The dam was built by the local contracting firm of William F. Geddis and David Duff Seerie, who also built the State Capitol, Denver's Brown Palace Hotel and, some years after the dam, the East Portal for the Moffat Tunnel.
Seerie's younger brother Peter was foreman of the rubble quarrying operation upstream from the construction site. He was among those injured when dynamite was accidentally ignited by a stone drill.
One worker remembers
In 1949, Charles Bjork reminisced for Colorado Magazine about working on the dam.
Bjork's uncle, William Wiborg, was foreman of the stone quarry where the Italian masons worked to create the facing stones of the dam, so perfectly fitted that the chief engineer rewarded the lead mason with a new $50 suit when the structure proved watertight.
As the wall of the dam blocked the streamflow, the lake forming in the valley was used to float stones, some weighing four or five tons, from the quarry to the building site. Smallpox struck among the immigrant stone masons, interrupting the work and costing some their lives.
Construction continued year-round, through the rough mountain winters. When the weather grew colder, Bjork "rode point" on the barges hauling the stone blocks, breaking the ice.
When the water froze too thick to navigate, they dragged the blocks over the ice on horse-drawn sledges.
Bjork concluded his memories with the story of an over-enthusiastic attempt to free more facing rock. His uncle, eager to speed up the quarrying, placed a huge charge that rocked the mountainside. It was the end of the day, and rubble rained down on the ice that workers were crossing. Fortunately, no one was injured.