Join the City of Tulsa in celebrating 100 years of the Spavinaw Water Project!
In the early 1900s, Tulsans used water from springs, wells and the Arkansas River which was full of gypsum, salt and silt. People used to say that after you took a bath, you dried off, then you dusted off. In 1908 during a hunting trip, a group of influential Tulsans came upon Spavinaw Creek, a crystal-clear, spring-fed stream. Once it was discovered that Spavinaw water could flow by gravity to Tulsa, wide-spread support for Spavinaw water began.
The innovative water system project which included the dam, a flowline, the Mohawk pumping station, a terminal reservoir and a storage tank at Reservoir Hill came at a cost of $7.5 million. It was a visionary project and was the largest per capita bond issued in U.S. history at the time, which passed by a 5-to-1 margin. During construction, Tulsa also purchased a 2,000-acre farm near Bird Creek and created Mohawk Park, the nation’s third-largest municipal park.
W.R. Holway, the engineer for the Spavinaw project, was only 28 years old when he was hired to design and build what was one of the largest water projects in the nation. After opening his engineering firm, Holway’s first client was the City of Tulsa, and his first major job was the Spavinaw water system. After construction was complete, Holway allowed the Tulsa mayor to put his final $15,000 paycheck in a bottle to float through the flowline, where he caught it as it came out at Mohawk.
Spavinaw Dam was constructed by the City of Tulsa in 1922 on Spavinaw Creek. Construction took two years to complete at a cost of $7.5 million dollars. Spavinaw Dam is two-thirds of a mile long, five stories high and impounds 8.5 billion gallons of water in Spavinaw Lake. When first built, the reservoir became the largest lake in the state of Oklahoma. The dam’s spillway was designed to be three-fourths of an inch higher in the middle to conform to the curvature of the earth’s surface.
The Spavinaw Creek watershed is located in Mayes and Delaware Counties in Oklahoma and Benton County in Arkansas. The watershed covers 230,000 acres and flows to the Neosho River which connects to the Arkansas River. Most of the water that fills Spavinaw Lake flows in from Spavinaw Creek. Spavinaw Lake is home to a variety of fish including trophy-quality largemouth bass, white bass, bluegill, flathead and channel catfish, crappie, carp and walleye.
Water from Spavinaw Lake flows by gravity to the City of Tulsa 54 miles away. This original flowline was the longest raw water line in the U.S. at the time of construction. Over its length, the pipeline drops by an elevation of 90 feet, crosses under two rivers, over eight creeks and through a 200-foot-tall ridge. The concrete pipe was manufactured at a factory in Verdigris that produced 96, 10-ton sections of concrete pipe each day for 13 months.
To expedite completion, the project’s 11 contracts were carried out simultaneously. Hundreds of workers swarmed over dozens of sites from Spavinaw Creek to Reservoir Hill, coordinated by 64 engineers. The project was completed in two years despite seven record-setting floods on the Grand and Verdigris Rivers, which caused the construction bridges to be washed out 13 times. The last piece of pipe was laid on the west bank of the Grand River on October 19, 1924.
Roads were virtually non-existent in 1923, so the contractor had to clear, grade and lay a rail line along the entire length of the flowline before construction could begin. A 700-foot-long tunnel was dynamited through hard limestone 40 feet beneath the floor of the Verdigris River. Near the town of Tiawah, miners bored a two-mile-long tunnel with explosives and hauled out the tailings with mule-drawn dump cars. During the process, they mined enough coal to fuel their steam engines.
The town of Spavinaw was repositioned to its present location after the completion of Spavinaw Dam. In the 1920s, many of Tulsa's wealthiest citizens built summer homes and clubs in Spavinaw to enjoy the lake and cool off from the summer heat. Boat races and water shows were staged on the scenic lake and Spavinaw became notorious as a wild town, boasting wide-open saloons. Today, Spavinaw has settled down as a small town and draws thousands annually to fish at Spavinaw Lake.
As Tulsa’s population continued to grow, a second dam was needed to ensure an adequate supply of drinking water. In 1946, a $15.8 million bond was issued for construction of the Eucha Dam located upstream of Spavinaw Lake. By 1954, a second flowline from Spavinaw to Tulsa was operational. In 2024, the City of Tulsa provides an average of 105 million gallons of refreshing, award-winning water to over 650,000 customers in and around the Tulsa metropolitan area each day.
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