Chaffey High School and the Community
A resource for history, news, and events surrounding the Chaffey Community.

The tract in which he is so interested is about seven miles long, running from north to south, and varies from a mile to three miles wide, east and west. The plain beginning at his feet is a slightly inclined plain, falling in a continuous slope to the horizon, where blue sky and purple sagebrush merge and melt into one. There is not one human habitation visible -- for ages jackrabbit and coyote have had it to themselves. After the infrequent rains it is covered with evanescent wild flowers, but in its normal arid state only sage brush and a few other desert growths can retain a footing there. So this lovely slope lying at the foot of snow-capped Old Baldy is useless for cultivation unless water can be brought to it from the mountains. 

In 1880, George, along with his wife Annette and his two young sons, visited his ailing father in California. George senior, who had retired from the family shipbuilding business located along the shores of Lake Michigan, had left Canada seeking the warmer climes of Southern California. He was intrigued by initial reports he had heard about the community of Riverside, a widely celebrated irrigation colony. The younger George, captivated the by California charm, never returned home to Canada from that visit to his father. 

William, third in a family of five siblings, was the horticulturist of the family. He built a house in Riverside for his parents and planted one of the first orange orchards in the Arlington district. The miracle of irrigation fascinated his brother George, who observed citrus thrive in an otherwise barren landscape and saw isolated, rural life transformed into progressive and social communities.   

Together with brother William, George formed a partnership. They had little capital, relying instead on brains, daring and initiative. George, with the mechanical mind, powers of leadership and vision, complemented the skills of William who was the horticulture and soil expert, a skillful preparer of business documents. He was the "personality man" of the two brothers. Their partnership would create two San Bernardino communities and later, two of Australia's principal agricultural districts. 

George was anxious to secure the interest of his Canadian friends in their new venture. He sought a name for the colony which would be pleasing to the ear of a Canadian, as well as family associations. Etiwanda, a popular Lake Michigan Indian Chief, who had established friendly business relations with his much-revered uncle Benjamin, was the name George chose for his first irrigation colony. 

The first surveys for Etiwanda were completed in 1882. The land was divided into 10-acre blocks and precious water was supplied to every block by cement pipe, a decision that insured growth and protection against drought, which had destroyed so many early settlements in the West. Delivering water in this manner through cement pipe later became the hallmark for towns throughout California. 

Living up to its name, "Community of Many Firsts," Etiwanda was one of the first California communities to offer its residents innovative public services and amenities for those times. The Etiwanda Mutual Water Company was California's first mutual. It was designed by George Chaffey and Luther Holt to prevent water wars, which were common between newly formed towns in the West.  

George was also the first engineer in the West to use mountain streams to generate electric current. He installed a small dynamo operated by the down-rushing torrent from one of his canyon streams. This provided electricity for a 3,000-watt arc lamp on a tower at George's house. This strange white light could be seen as far away as Riverside. Los Angeles immediately became envious and hired George to install their first six street lights. He eventually became president and engineer of the Los Angeles Electric Company. 

Chaffey's Etiwanda home also contained the first long distance telephone in California and it retained that distinction for many years.

This is an early camp car, dubbed
"Sally Brown," from the 1920s
designed by George Chaffey Jr.

An important part of George Chaffey's dream for Ontario was the main thoroughfare, as beautiful as it was unusual, and which would capture the imagination and interest of people throughout the world. He laid out a straight, 15-mile long double boulevard, 200 feet wide. He commissioned E. J. Jacquet to plant trees, especially selected by his brother William, for their resistance to heat and drought, as well as for their beauty. Palm (later to be removed), pepper, eucalyptus and grevilleas trees were planted in four distinct rows. 

Chaffey called this boulevard "Euclid Avenue" after the famous mathematician. On September 15, 1903, a committee of distinguished landscape architects selected Euclid Avenue as one of the most beautiful thoroughfares in the world. George Chaffey was developing an international reputation as a first rate irrigation engineer. 

The Chaffey Brothers' California successes were noticed by Australian government officials who were grappling with killer droughts in their own young country. Courted by the Australian Cabinet Minister, Alfred Deakin who was also the chairman of the Royal Commission on Water supply and Irrigation, George Chaffey set out for Australia in1886. Misled by an over-scrupulous agent in Stephen Cureton, and with thinly stretched resources, time and attention over too many irrigation projects spelled disaster for the Chaffeys in Australia. Chaffey's Australian adventures proved to be technically impressive but financially ruinous. 

Arriving back in the states in the late 1880's, George Chaffey became associated with the most ambitious reclamation scheme the New World had witnessed up to that time -- the irrigation of the Colorado Desert. It has been written that George Chaffey was both repelled and fascinated by the vast rainless, lifeless, treeless and waterless expanses of California, which could be transformed through the marvels of irrigation. 

On April 3, 1900, George Chaffey signed a contract with the California Development Company to construct canals capable of diverting 400,000 acre-feet of water a year from the Colorado River to the arid Imperial Valley in California. The complexity and variety of problems associated with this eventually successful irrigation project attest to George Chaffey's abilities as a master builder, manager, diplomat and problem-solver. 

It seems an understatement to say that George Chaffey was a man of vision. He was the first to provide guaranteed water to individual settlers and land owners, the first to form a water mutual using community cooperation, the first to combine hydroelectric development and irrigation and the first to recognize the necessity for water conservation. 

Living up to the family motto, Nosce Te Ipsum, Know Thy Self,  Gnotqi Sauton, George Chaffey was endowed with an insistent desire for self-realization and genius that made him such a constructive force in two hemispheres.