in 1918, when electricity reached the Rockford area, the Aberdeen-Springfield Canal implemented a plan devised a decade earlier to pump water from the canal up to two higher laterals.
The station was placed just west about a half mile from the rock cut that Highway 39 passes through (if you look on the west side of the road where the railroad tracks run, you can see the cement structure that directed the east lateral's flow eastward under the tracks).
The lateral ran southeasterly along a ridge, eventually crossing Hilltop Road a mile south of Rockford, it was reportedly twelve miles long. Some of the flume work and trestling needed for the water to cross the canal remains. The original flume spanned 220 feet and ran from a basin on the west side to the lateral on the east. The west lateral also drew from that basin.
The lateral heading southwesterly irrigated thousands of acres but its location has been erased. A Metsker map of 1940, however, shows its original path as passing across Liberty Road and Willow Road and continuing through the area northwest of Pingree. Sometime between 1940 and 1962 the flow for that canal was moved to the ditch rider's home area, where another lateral already broke to the east (it crosses Highway 39 about a mile south of Liberty). The portion of the "Aberdeen Highline" that drew from the pumping station was then abandoned.
With D.H. Blossom in charge, the station was completed in 1920 and, as you can see, its foundation still stands. Thirty-two subscribers along the power line from Blackfoot helped make the project feasible, fourteen already receiving service at the time and the others awaiting transformers. The plant consisted of a 250 horsepower motor throwing 42 second-feet of water (2500 inches) and a second, 150 horsepower motor, moving 1500 inches. The water was split, one portion going west and one eastward, over the canal, via a 220 foot long, six foot wide steel flume. B.A. Pearson lived at the station with his family.
Local resident Art Young, whose family's land adjoined the east lateral, recalls tubing from the station to the railroad flume as a child. The canal was abandoned in the early 1960s, likely when Highway 39 was updated to its present location from the original "Roosevelt Highway" version that ran along section lines and had a number of 90 degree turns. The absence of a flume to take water under the new highway indicates that date of abandonment, no doubt aided by the arrival of sprinkler irrigation in the area. The west lateral was likely abandoned even earlier
Read about the canal in The Shanghi Plain: Bingham County's Early History, available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
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