The city of Hurricane, Utah is located in the center of Washington County 18 miles East of St. George, Utah.
In the 1800’s, when Mormon Pioneers began to settle Washington County, the Hurricane bench was a flat, desert landscape with over 2,000 acres of farmable land. However, the only water was located deep in a gorge carved by the Virgin River on the North side of the valley. Farming that land would be impossible.
The settlers chose to settle upstream and formed small communities next to the river. The town of Virgin was formed in 1858. The people along the Virgin river soon realized that the river could not be tamed. Their farmland was subject to flooding, homes were destroyed, and crops ruined. With the continual growth in population, they had to find a more suitable location to build homes, grow crops, and raise their families.
In 1893, James Jepson and John Steel determined that a diversion dam could be built upstream from the Hurricane bench and that a 7.5 mile canal could be built to bring water to future settlers.
In 1994, work on the canal began. By January 1995, the first diversion dam had been built of large rocks. However that dam was destroyed after about a year by severe flooding. It had to be replaced multiple times. The final dam was built of a large log and timbers woven together with wire. This dam held.
The building of the canal was a slow process. It was built mostly by hand with picks and shovels by Mormon settlers during winter months when the men did not need to be home tending to their farms.
The canal was 8 feet wide at the bottom, 10 feet wide at the top, and 4 feet deep.
On August, 6, 1904, the first water flowed down the canal and into the Hurricane Valley.
Those who worked on the canal were given 20 acres of land on the South side of town and a 2.5 acre lot in town. Those lots were assigned by drawing lots.
The first family to move to the Hurricane Valley was Thomas M. Hinton and his wife Wilhelmina in 1906.
The canal continued to be used until 1990 when it was fully replaced by an underground pipeline. Hikers can now walk the length of the dry canal and through 11 of its 12 tunnels.
“The Hurricane Canal is perhaps best seen as the recognition of necessity. New lands and the water to irrigate them were essential if families were to stay intact. To bring water to those lands a canal had to be constructed, Once that necessity was recognized, the rest followed as a matter of course. While one may marvel at men willing to accomplish their goals by using rather primitive hand tools in the midst of a rapidly industrializing society, it is their determination and not their engineering prowess which should be most admired.” -Washington County Historical Society