New Croton Dam

The New Croton Dam (also known as Cornell Dam), part of the New York City water supply system, stretches across the Croton River near Croton-on-Hudson, New York, about 22 miles (35 km) north of New York City. Construction began in 1892 and was completed in 1906. Designed by Alphonse Fteley (1837–1903), this masonry dam is 266 feet (81 m) broad at its base and 297 feet (91 m) high from base to crest. Its foundation extends 130 feet (40 m) below the bed of the river, and the dam contains 850,000 cubic yards (650,000 m³) of masonry. The engineers' tablet mounted on the headhouse nearest the spillway lists the spillway length as 1,000 feet (300 m) and the total length of the dam and spillway combined as 2,188 feet (667 m). At the time of its completion, it was the tallest dam in the world. New Croton Dam impounds up to 19 billion US gallons (72,000,000 m³) of water, a small fraction of the New York City water system's total storage capacity of 580 billion US gallons (2.2×10⁹ m³).

Croton Dam (Michigan)

Croton Dam (or Croton Hydroelectric Plant) is an earth-filled embankment dam and powerplant complex on the Muskegon River in Croton Township, Newaygo County, Michigan. It was built in 1907 under the direction of William D. Fargo by the Grand Rapids - Muskegon Power Company, a predecessor of Consumers Energy. The 40-foot-high (12 m) dam impounds 7.2 billion U.S. gallons (6 billion imp. gal/27 billion L) of water in its 1,209-acre (489 ha) reservoir and is capable of producing 8,850 kilowatts at peak outflow. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

History

The history of the Croton dam is intertwined with the history of William A. Foote (1854–1915) and James B. Foote (1867-1924), brothers from Adrian, Michigan, with a burgeoning electric power empire, along with William G. Fargo, a Jackson-based civil engineer who designed similar hydroelectric plants throughout the Midwest.

William A. Foote was a 30-year-old grist mill operator in Adrian, Michigan, in 1884 when, in what was then a common occurrence, he provided space and shaft power from his mill wheel to Thomson - Houston, a local electric utility startup, to light 12 streetlights. Fascinated by the potential, within a year he enlisted his then 17-year-old brother James and moved to Jackson, Michigan, and in 1886 they jointly founded Jackson Electric Light Works (a predecessor company to Consumers Energy), which began by lighting downtown Jackson electrically. The Foote brothers set up similar city specific companies in Battle Creek and Adrian within a few years. In many cases dams already built for grist mills, sawmills and the like were refit for electric generators, but in some cases, new dams were constructed. As the familiarity with the technology, and the technology itself, improved, the scope of projects became more ambitious.