The Prime Property in the Lavas
75 claimants vie for same ground in the lavas in a State of Idaho land drawing
7/8/20261 min read
In October of 1917, the State of Idaho held a drawing for 20,000 acres of land at the Bingham County Courthouse. The land had first been segregated from the public domain two decades earlier for the American Falls Canal project under the Carey Act, but the canal couldn't irrigate these lands west of the canal system—lands that reached from Moreland to Aberdeen. 284 filers put their hat in the ring, the most desired piece of ground coveted by 75 different applicants. Shown below (blue pin on the Google Earth map, the northwest corner of section 12 on the other map—which displays Lemhi Road going through the lavas, the shaded area), the ground is now owned by Leavitt Farms and appears to be prime farm land, but why would so many people want that acreage if it wasn't irrigated in 1917?
Well, it may have been. According to court documents the Peoples Canal expansion project called the Highline Canal (later, the West Side Canal) traversed the lavas into that pocket of farmable ground—though as yet no one has come forth who knows exactly what that route may have been. Another leg went southwest—you can see its old culvert wasting away at the edge of Highway 26 when you drive through the lava cut past Moreland, and if you walk to the southwest just a hundred feet or so you can see the 'V' shaped cut (surely dynamited) that the canal was flumed through.
A piece of ground nearby the highly prized acreage (which Mrs. Maude Ross won in the drawing) was filed on around the same time, curiously enough, by an Italian man named Mario Locatelli, who with other Italians from Pocatello (approximately 400 lived there, most of them railroad workers) started Gate City Macaroni. Locatelli may have been the farmer to provide a proper wheat variety for their product.
