CASTLE ROCK — The 3.9-mile-long wooden water pipe that slaked the thirst of some 500 early Castle Rock residents was a workhorse.
It moved 75,000 gallons of water a day, 27.3 million gallons a year and 657 million gallons over its 24-year life, from 1916 to 1940.
An 8-foot section of the pipe — hand-hewn and constructed of 1-inch-thick, 3-inch-wide wooden staves — was unearthed last summer on the site of a road-building project near Crystal Valley Parkway and Interstate 25.
Now the bulk of the pipeline goes on display at the Plum Creek Water Purification Facility in Castle Rock, while a smaller segment will make the rounds through town over the next few months, including temporary stops at Town Hall, the Philip S. Miller Library and the Castle Rock Museum.
“The idea that this is 100 years old and provided water service to the people who founded this town — that’s just cool,” said Mark Marlowe, utilities director for Castle Rock. “This connects me to the origination of the municipal water system.”
The pipe, held together by tightly wound heavy-gauge iron wire, was actually the second generation of water conveyance in this Douglas County town, replacing a wooden pipe that had likely gone into service in the early 1890s. Before that, water was mainly moved via ditch.
With an internal diameter of 10 inches, the $22,000 pipe carried 1 cubic foot of water per second from East Plum Creek to downtown.
“Some of our initial water rights were established when this pipe was put in,” Marlowe said.
Shaun Boyd, archivist with Douglas County Libraries, said discoveries like the wooden pipe are rare in Castle Rock.
“It’s always neat to connect people to their past, and in this fast-growing area, artifacts aren’t found very often,” she said.
The pipeline represents an era when Castle Rock stood still, maintaining a population of around 500 right up until 1950 or so, Boyd said. The town now .
The Plum Creek Water Purification Facility, , processes up to 4 million gallons of water a day. That could jump to 12 million gallons a day when the town reaches its build-out population of 100,000.
“It’s hard to imagine that there were only 500 people here for most of our history as a town,” Boyd said.
Marlowe said that as much as he admires the craftsmanship that went into the wooden stave design of the pipe, he doesn’t want to return to an era when water went untreated and left people susceptible to disease and illness.
“I don’t want to go back to that simpler time,” he said.
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefold
