“Legend has it that the rusted iron cell you see before you was once used to house prisoners that were brought in to dig out the area for the Lowline Ditch. You can imagine during long hot days, digging this ditch wouldn't have been the most fun of projects, and they would likely work up quite the appetite. It is said that the guards were wanting to relax during lunch hour and not worry about the inmates trying to escape. So three of these temporary jail cells were brought in to house the inmates during the lunch hour and other break periods throughout the day. But why were they digging the lowline ditch in the first place? Well, there was large water problem in Colorado, largely due to the fact that in 1955 roughly 4000 irrigation wells between Kersey and Julesburg Colorado, pumped 585,000 acre feet of water for irrigation. To give you an idea as to how much water that is, it is enough to fill Horsetooth Reservoir in Fort Collins four times!

Needless to say this had a harmful and obvious impact of depleting the underground reservoir. So to mitigate that alarming issue, ditches and recharge ponds were built to allow water to slowly make its way back to the river, which would help offset the well pumping. If this sounds like a lot to wrap your mind around, you can probably imagine what it felt like to the inmates who were out here during those hot days digging this ditch, for what I imagine they presumed was being done for no reason whatsoever! But perhaps the appeal of being outside, even while shoveling dirt, offered them a mental escape from their hours behind bars... Either way, the rusted iron jail cell before you, gives you a glimpse back in time right here along the South Platte River...