Helen Schmidt Excerpt from Pioneer Voices 2008
“…it was Great-Great-Grandfather who started the irrigation here in 1903…he built a dam up where the weir is now and he started irrigating. I am not sure what year they had the dam completed, but in 1912 it was wrecked with spring flooding and they had to rebuild it.
“… irrigation has meant a lot. It has been the life of this community, it really has”.
“…one of the things that would be of interest is the fact that in 1937, the Cypress Lake went dry or practically dry. I am one of the few people who is still living who would have walked across that lake bottom over to the other side of the lake to help my parents’ pick berries. I was only about 7 or something, but I can remember jumping across these big cracks in the ground where the lake bottom was. Daddy couldn’t take the team of horses across because it was kind of soft I suppose, so he tied them to some trees on the south side of the lake and we walked across to the other side and picked berries.”
