17 April 2026 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100
DC Jackson (Lafayette College)
“John R. Freeman: The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy”
In December 1913, the US Congress and President Woodrow Wilson authorized the City of San Francisco to build a massive municipal water supply dam in the northern reaches of Yosemite National Park. This approval came after a decade long struggle in which preservationists led by John Muir fought to protect Hetch Hetchy from inundation and created what William Cronon has termed “the single most famous episode in American conservation history.” Usually framed as a battle between Muir and the renowned conservationist Gifford Pinchot (who amazingly never visited the valley), the story of the Hetch Hetchy controversy has long been told from a preservationist perspective, one that provides remarkably little insight into how, in the face of intense opposition, the city proved successful in winning the right to build a dam in the park. In my book The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy, the focus shifts to the work of the East Coast consulting engineer John R. Freeman, explaining his origins as a hydraulic engineer, the nature of his engagement with San Francisco, and the professional experiences that underlay his creation of a 421-page report that detailed a dam and aqueduct capable of delivering 400 million gallons of water per day to the Bay Area. Upon completion of his Hetch Hetchy report in the late summer of 1912, Freeman then became a key political advocate and lobbyist for the city, operating in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., to promote the city’s cause. Beyond exploring the complexity of Freeman’s work as a Progressive Era consulting engineer, the seminar will provide an opportunity to discuss the political nature of engineering and the forces that created the hydraulic infrastructure of the modern American West.
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DC Jackson is the Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History at Lafayette College. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Engineering from Swarthmore College. He has had a long-standing interest in the history of water in the American West and his book Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster (co-authored with the late Norris Hundley jr.) was awarded the Society for the History of Technology’s Sally Hacker Prize in 2017.