Decker Lake & The Flooded Hayfields: David McKenzie’s Fight for Dry Land

We all know about Granger had a "High Water Table Area". We had so many lakes & canals running high. Some say there were almost a dozen at one time. In 1896 the McKenzie family (near Decker Lake) had 8" of water in their fields. Do you have any Granger "High Water" stories?

Decker Lake Hayfields & High Water: A Glimpse Into 1896

Back in 1896, life around Decker Lake (once part of the lush west side farmlands) was shaped not just by hard work — but by water. And sometimes, there was just too much of it.

One summer day, David McKenzie, who farmed near Decker Lake, showed up at the county commissioners’ meeting in Salt Lake City with a big problem — and he wasn’t quiet about it. His alfalfa fields, rich and green, were underwater. Eight inches deep, to be exact — and the level was still rising half an inch every day. If it kept up, McKenzie joked he’d have to cut hay from a rowboat!

Years before, David and his neighbors had built a local ditch to drain water from their fields. The county and three canal companies asked permission to tie their bigger drainage projects into this ditch — and the farmers, hoping for better water control, agreed. For a while it worked beautifully, draining the wet meadows around Decker Lake into the Jordan River. But by 1896, the old ditch had begun to overflow its banks, flooding fields instead of saving them.

Rather than sue the county, McKenzie invited the commissioners out to see for themselves — sweetening the deal by promising a churn full of buttermilk and “lots of things” if they’d fix the drainage so the hay could be harvested dry.

That summer, the county road committee and the surveyor rode out to the “sweet fields of Eden” west of the Jordan River, hoping to solve the problem and get the water flowing in the right direction again.

Stories like this remind us just how much the early settlers and farmers around Decker Lake, Granger, and Hunter depended on ditches, canals, and teamwork — and how neighborly negotiation sometimes saved a season’s hay.