Orchard Homes Accents the Latter

By John A. Forssen

Orchard Homes is a Missoula suburb with few orchards and a lot of homes – more and more all the time.

The area of rich soil and pleasant views west of the city is becoming more and more  attractive as a place to live for Missoulians who feel the need for peace and quiet, away from the city’s growing clamor.

Dreams of “a little elbow room” have lured many persons to the Orchard Homes district. Others want a spot to do a little farming, although many of these find the reality of agriculture, even on a small scale, a rude awakening.

Those who do go to Orchard Homes to grow things, from flowers to corn, find some of the most productive soil in the country. Mostly river bottom, it will grow almost anything, even for a beginner.

The area was once a handful of big farms. Now it is divided into hundreds of small plots, and many of its 2,000 or so residents cultivate the soil only as a hobby.

They live in an area which goes almost as far back into history as Missoula, which was founded in 1865.

Rich as the land is, it has always needed water to reach its fullest potential, and an irrigation system was started as far back as the late 1870’s, probably in 1876. *

*[An article appearing in The Missoulian on June 14, 1878 stated the following:

“Mssrs. Booth, Kelly and Farrell are engaged in taking out a large irrigation ditch, commencing at the bridge across Missoula river, for their farms on Bitter root, below fort Missoula. The ditch will be five or six miles long, and is a credit to the enterprise of the few men who have undertaken it.”]

“The ditch” then was known as the Miller – Kelly – Gannon Ditch after the pioneer residents who built it.

They took water from the Clark Fork River, then mostly known as the Hell Gate or the Missoula, at a point about three quarters of a mile east of the confluence of Rattlesnake Creek, as early legal documents describe it.

The modern irrigation system, a network of nearly 50 miles of canals and laterals, still begins at the same point, now described as near the Van Buren Street Bridge.

It has a different name now. Since 1922, it has been the Missoula Irrigation District, a reorganization of the old, loose company.

When it was reorganized, about 220 families “lived under the ditch,” as the saying goes. Now the land of about 550 families is served by water from the system.

Nearly all of the homesteaders of the huge area which is Orchard Homes were in on the early ditch building.

They included Edward Miller, also a miner, whose homestead straddled what is now Third street in the Hawthorne School area: William Kelly, who came in the 1870’s and took up a homestead which was bounded on the south by the section line that is now 11th street; a man named Cave, no relation to pioneer Alfred Cave, who had 160 acres west of Reserve street and between 11th street and South avenue, and Michael Gannon, whose place was north of the Miller homestead.*

*[This description is somewhat inaccurate. William Kelly’s older brother, Owen Kelley, was also one of the original builders of this ditch. The combined Kelley/Kelly homesteads were a patchwork of nearly 800 acres of property bisected by modern Clements Road. William Kelly’s property was bounded on the south by what is today’s, South Avenue. One piece of Owen Kelley’s homestead included land on what is now called Kelly Island.  It is likely that Alfred Cave, the pioneer, was also active in building the ditch.]

Cave just barely beat the U. S. Army to a piece of land. The story is that he filed on his homestead just a day or two before the Army claimed two square miles for the Ft. Missoula military reservation in 1877.

The homestead house built by William Kelly still stands on 14th street, half a mile east of Clement road.*

*[The house referred to here was on Owen Kelley’s homestead, east of Clements Road, near Mount Ave. His brother, William Kelly’s property resided west of Clements Road. The ‘Pepper Pot’ house still standing on Clements Road originally belonged to William Kelly.]

William Spurgin, another early settler, had a homestead north of 11th street. His house, remodeled into a charming home by Mrs. George Shepherd, is on 11th street.

The homestead was between what are now Park and Hiberta streets. The latter has come to be called Niberta street.

Major Michael McCauley, another early settler, homesteaded on land south of South avenue in the area where Target Range School now stands. He claimed the hill south of South avenue which geologists say is the terminal moraine of a glacier which cut the earth out of Hellgate Canyon.

Homesteading in the same area, but farther west, was Joseph Foley, whose land is now owned by members of the Pomajevich family.*

*[Thomas Foley was the settler referred to here.]

Joseph Booth and a man named Gharrett were other early settlers in the area.

Major McCauley, who had been superintendent of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation at Browning, had a hand in the founding of Ft. Missoula after he came here and went into the cattle business on his homestead.

The story goes that Army officers were scheduled to come here to inspect rival sites for the military post, one west of the city and the other near Maj. McCauley’s homestead.

The enterprising McCauley, it is said, intercepted the military party east of the city and hustled the officers to his place, entertaining them royally while extolling the virtues of that location.

The officers eventually saw the other site, but decided on the place where the reservation now is located. But they still didn’t get what they intended to, the story says. They claimed two square-mile sections but got mixed up on the numbers, failing to get the section they wanted between Reserve and Russell streets, bounded on the north by South avenue. Instead, they claimed the two sections immediately west, starting at Reserve street.

Maj. McCauley also was a man who had many mules, and in about 1878 he was engaged to work on the ditch, enlarging it and constructing new lines.

The first ditch went as far as 11th street, probably along that line to about where Tower street is now. It was undoubtedly an engineering feat for those early day builders. They had just enough fall to keep the water moving, yet the minimum to conserve elevation, enabling the water to reach further. The first three miles of the ditch has a drop of only two feet.

It is quite amazing to realize that the ditch designed and built so long ago is still carrying water efficiently.

The ditch company owns the right to use water from the Clark Fork River and also owns the land of the ditch and its banks. The right to the land comes from the water right, under the provisions of territorial law. As the ditch was expanded, a few early owners gave right of way for it, usually in return for a water right.

Nobody owns the water, or, putting it another way, everybody owns it. Those who use water from the ditch own only the right to use the water.

The right to the use of the water is measured in miner’s inches, a complex system which involves a maze of mathematics. A miner’s inch is 11 gallons and one quart per minute, or a barrel of water in 5 minutes. *

* [A ‘miner’s inch’ has many descriptions and can vary from state to state. “The term ‘miners inch’ is not definite without specification of the head or pressure. It has been defined as the amount of water that will pass in twenty-four hours through an opening one inch square under a pressure of six inches, however, it varies by locality.” – Alfred H. Ricketts, American Mining Law with Forms and Precedents, 4th ed. California Division of Mines Bulletin 123, p.26 (Feb. 1943).]

Each user has a headgate, or turnout, through which his water is measured. Sometimes the watermaster sets the gate for the amount of water to which the user is entitled, but more often the user does it himself.

The water user would only have to open the gate a little wider to steal water to which he was not entitled, or go out in the dark of night and open wider a gate set by the watermaster.

The obvious conclusion is that the members of the ditch company must be on an honor system.

They are, and it works. It has never been necessary to put a lock on the headgate of any member.

An inch of water is supposed to irrigate an acre, but it will not especially in Orchard Homes and other western Montana areas where porous gravel underlies the topsoil.

So, all the members actually get two or three times as much water as they have a right to. But the amount is still in proportion to the various water rights.

Sometimes this is more water than the ditch will carry. During periods of peak use, it is sometimes necessary for the users to take turns. For instance, all the users on one side of a lateral ditch may use water for two or three days, with the headgates closed on the other side. Then, their gates are closed and those on the other side opened for an equal period.

During the peak of the irrigating season, the ditch often carries as much as 8,000 inches of water through the city on the way to Orchard Homes. Those familiar with miner’s inches say this is a lot of water.

While the members of the ditch company have proven themselves basically honest over the years, they don’t all trust each other completely all the time. If the water is a little short, it is natural to suspect somebody up the ditch.

Then the phones start ringing in the homes of the five ditch commissioners and the watermaster. Often these men reach the heights of diplomacy in smoothing ruffled feelings and settling tiffs.

The commissioners serve without pay, according to a precedent established at one of the first meetings after the 1922 reorganization, although state law says they may be reimbursed. The watermaster is not a fulltime employee. He supervises the spring-cleaning of the ditch, usually beginning in April, and works until the water is shut off in September or October.

Most of their trouble comes from new residents of the ditch area. They sometimes neglect to keep their ditches clean and fail to spread the water effectively once they get it.

Another trouble faced by the commissioners is the refuse thrown in the ditch.  Most of this is done by children due to their seeming inability to resist the fun of throwing thing into water.

Each spring, and sometimes during the summer, refuse must be removed from the ditches and laterals.  This amounts to many truckloads.

Another form of recreation provided by the ditch, in addition to throwing things, is swimming.  Many a Missoula resident recalls the ecstasy of a swim in the “Ninth Street Ditch” on a hot summer day. As many as 2,000 swimmers, including a considerable number of adults, have been counted at one time in the ditch.

By providing a shady camp ground near the intake, the ditch also furnishes a haven for “tourists” who alight from Milwaukee Railroad freight trains to sojourn in Missoula.

The first step in getting water into the ditch actually takes place up the river from the intake, about a quarter of a mile.  There is placed a stone diversion dam which directs water toward the south bank of the river. From an opening there, a dike connects to the beginning of the ditch channel. At this time of the year, high spring water spills over both dam and dike.

Just above the Van Buren Street Bridge is the control dam, which permits excess water to spill over and back into the river. It was in the waste spillway channel that logs and debris piled up in the 1948 spring flood, causing the water to wreck the south end of the bridge.

Just below the bridge are the main headgates, together with a sluice that removes bark and small logs from the ditch channel.

Below the main headgates the ditch meanders along, passing through a park at the Milwaukee station.

The ditch has many ends. The farthest one from the intake, about seven miles as the water flows, is just west of the Miller Creek Road, near where that road divides for its upper and lower routes.

The ditch culverts under the road and then irrigates a pasture before seeping away into the Bitter Root River.

The spot is also the farthest south point on the system. Farthest west is Maclay Bridge; north, River road, and east, just west of the city limits.

The system is divided into seven divisions, split up so that there will be about an equal number of headaches for the commissioner in charge of each.

John S. Pomajevich is president of the company and Kenneth Richardson is vice president. They are also commissioners, along with Louis A. Colvill. Andrew Pringle and James A. Thomas.

The first president after the 1922 reorganization was Mike Malone. He was succeeded by R. T. Richardson and then came M. R. Marshall and Pomajevich.

The man who “drew up the papers” when the ditch was reorganized was Leon L. Bulen, and he has been secretary and attorney for the organization since.

Bulen, who has become an authority on Orchard Homes and its residents as well as on water rights, commented on the honor system for apportioning water.

“The are all reasonably honest until everybody cuts alfalfa on the same day and then you could put the whole Missoula River on the dry land left after the harvest.”

The ditch far antedates Orchard Homes as such, but it was one reason for one of the most remarkable real estate developments in Montana.

At about the turn of the century, two gentlemen named S. C. F. Cobban and Samuel Dinsmore conceived the idea of subdividing and selling five-acre tracts in the area west of Missoula.

They were from Butte, and knew that many of the miners and other residents of that city would welcome the chance to retire on a garden spot.

One of the first ranches they bought to subdivide was one of 160 acres owned by the sons of Christopher P. Higgins, Missoula cofounder. The property, used to keep the family string of race horses and including a covered race track, was just west of the city.

Other developers of five-acre tracts appeared on the scene, including T. A. Price, Archie Price, R. R. Jones and two pioneer Missoula blacksmiths who had shops almost adjacent on West Front street. Joseph Deschamps and Frank Kern. The latter was the father of Fire Chief Clare P. Kern.

Hundreds of five-acre plots appeared on maps of the Orchard Homes area, and most of the old ranches were split up.

A smaller ditch was built, taking off from the river just below the Milwaukee Railroad passenger station.

Many of the plots were sold, depending to a great extent on whether there was a water right on one of the ditches.

But the boom subsided and was replaced by a steady growth which continues today with the difference that fewer of the new residents are serious farmers.

The above article appeared in The Missoulian on May 29, 1955.