If you are a farmer from Juab County, you know how important irrigation water is. This is what it cost to make a cement headgate for ditches in the late 1940's

Utah is the second driest state in the Union, and as such, water is a critical factor to the farmers which built Juab County and sustained it for the past 164 years. In the old days, we used canvas to block the ditches for "our turn" to "water". We would shovel clods of grass or dirt on the sides to hold it in place. It was a weekly chore, often in the middle of the night, but that is how all farmers did it. Then came Alma Jones of Nephi, Utah, who by trade new cement. In the 1950's he devised a system where he could make reusable wood forms to build the head gate, then re-use it for the next water user that called him. This is his receipt book and two of the receipts for Eugene Pay and Art Scott. As a youngster, I recall helping him take up the forms and place them in another ditch. We thought we were going to make millions on this non-patented idea. The dam broke when they started to put in cement ditches, and then in the city-they put the water in pipes underground, as it conserved water. Well that is progress I guess, but I miss the hot summer days when I could float my boat down the ditch all the way down from the head gate of Ross Garrett down 7th North to our place.