Photo showing San Dieguito Municipal Water Authority officials at construction site of Lake Hodges Dam in December 1918.

One hundred years ago to the month, the January 1, 1924 issue of The San Diego Union  ran an article headlined: “New Irrigation Districts Formed in County.” The article, by Winfield Barkley, then Manager for County Development at the Southern Trust and Commerce Bank, began by noting that “At the beginning of 1923,” local dam and reservoir projects like the Sweetwater, Lake Hodges and Escondido systems, along with private pumping plants, had brought “close to 25,000 acres under irrigation within the county.”

In the ensuing year, according to the article, continued growth in the existing reservoirs plus the addition of new irrigation districts such as Vista would soon increase the amount of irrigated land in San Diego County to “upwards of 75,000 acres of agricultural land—three times the present acreage.”

In a sidebar to the same article, Barkley predicted that when the water resources of the county were fully developed, there would be “sufficient domestic water available to support a population of upwards of 1,000,000 people—eight times the present population.”

The county’s population in 1924, extrapolating from 1920 US Census figures, would have been around 125,000. We’re up to a county population of roughly 3.3 million as of the 2020 Census. You could say we’ve met that 1924 prediction and then some, albeit with the help of irrigation projects connecting with the Colorado River and northern California. And access to a steady water supply certainly made a big difference!