Jessie Ansari, Peak to Peak. The sight of Barker Reservoir, before the mountains, is a beautiful welcome to all who enter the valley from Boulder Canyon. Forested ridges along its north and south borders flank Nederland’s valley as Middle Boulder Creek’s swift cold waters cut through, fed by snowmelt and mountain springs. By the early 1900s, Nederland had grown from a ramshackle collection of cabins at the west side of the valley to a thriving boomtown, benefiting from the growing tungsten industry. 

An ever-increasing demand for electricity and engineering developments in the early 20th century led to the construction of dams and hydroelectric power stations in Colorado and across the country. W. McCleod, a Boulder capitalist, saw the potential of such a project for Middle Boulder Creek and bought up two ranches on Sulphide Flats, just west of Nederland. He sold his tracts to the Central Colorado Power Co., which was later named the Public Service Company of Colorado, and then became Xcel Energy. 

The company selected its first dam site to be near the present-day Arapaho Ranch, but a series of tests showed that it would geologically be an unsuitable place to build the dam. The area between Eldora and Nederland was then known as Sulphide Flats, and underlying the land is an ancient glacial gravel deposit. 

The company soon selected its next location, just east of Nederland on the lower end of Barker Ranch. The owner, Mrs. Hannah Barker, declined to sell the ranch. Hannah Connell had been born in Ireland in 1844 and immigrated to Massachusetts as a child. She received a college education during her travels west and her first Colorado teaching job was in Ward, where without an official schoolhouse, classes were sometimes held in saloons among whiskey bottles. After marrying Ezra Barker, a wealthy real estate and mining investor, Hannah moved to Boulder and stopped teaching.

Ezra died of consumption six years after they married, and Hannah remained involved in many community affairs. 

The power company filed condemnation proceedings over her mountain property. The case was tried, and Mrs. Barker lost her land but was given $23,000 as compensation. After losing her Nederland area land, she donated a parcel of land at 15th and Spruce Street in Boulder. Hannah Barker died in 1938 at the age of 74 as the influenza epidemic swept through the country.

For several years, the Colorado & Northwestern Railroad had been hauling out ore and bringing tourists into the mountains. The first train passed Sulphide Flats and headed on to Eldora in January 1905, and construction operations on the dam began two years later. Materials were hauled from Boulder via the railroad, which built a spur on the Eldora line from Sulphide Flats. Over 600 men began work on the dam along with 160 horses and mules, six locomotives, 150 dump cars, ten steam concrete mixers and innumerable drills, hoists, boilers and pumps. There were two aerial trams, a sawmill and three 170-ton steam shovels. An economic depression interrupted work on the dam from 1907 until June 1908. By that fall they had reached the bedrock, but workers were unable to pour the concrete during the freezing winter and had to wait until summer 1909 to continue. 

The construction work was not without peril. One account recalls how lightning in a sudden summer storm ignited dynamite charges set to blast a channel for the sides of the dam walls. Eight men, the crews of two steam shovels, perished underneath rubble from the explosion.

When completed in 1910 Barker Dam stood an imposing 624 feet wide and 172 feet high. During a public ceremony that summer, the mayor of Boulder, Alfred S. Greenman, threw the lever that started generating power. In reality, the plant was not quite ready to produce and the power that came on that day was from the Shoshone hydro plant near Glenwood Springs. The railroad removed its spur line and the reservoir was allowed to fill up. During times of low water, this railroad grade can still be seen today. 

Concrete pipeline draws water from Barker Reservoir 11 miles east to Kossler Reservoir. Laying this pipeline through the steep terrain was a huge undertaking. From Kossler, the pipeline drops almost two thousand feet down a gradually narrowing steel penstock tube. At the time it was built, this drop created the highest water pressure of any dam system in the United States. Specially built wagons and teams of up to 16 horses hauled in the materials needed to build the hydroelectric plant.

Barker dam’s purpose was also to create water storage. The pipeline directs water to the City of Boulder’s Betasso Water Treatment Plant. In 2001, the City of Boulder purchased the hydroelectric project, including Barker and Kossler reservoirs from Xcel Energy.

There may be plans to re-face the dam in the next couple of decades purely for cosmetic reasons, annual inspections show it to be solid. The town itself is ever changing, but Barker Dam, the century old icon of Nederland, will continue to sit sentinel for many years to come.

The information for this article has come from primarily these three books. Nederland: A Trip to Cloudland, Isabel M. Becker Third Edition, Revised. Silver, Gold and Black Iron, by Donald C. Kemp. Excursions from Peak to Peak Then and Now, by Silvia Pettem. These books are available to read at the Nederland Community Library.