The town of St. Helena got its first municipal water company on July 27, 1878. The St. Helena Star announced it that morning: “It gives us great pleasure to record at last the formation of a company for the supply of St. Helena with water. It is something she has long needed.” The directors, listed in the Star, were John York, Charles Krug, Jacob Beringer, Seneca Ewer, and G. K. Gluyas — the same wine families whose names still hang over Highway 29.
Key takeaways
- St. Helena’s first water company was chartered in 1878 by five winemaking families.
- Its first dam, across York Canyon, was built by Chinese laborers and supplied the town for about 80 years.
- Bell Canyon Dam, completed in 1959 and later raised, is the city’s primary water source today.
- The original 1878 York dam took 27 years and multiple lawsuits to finally come down, in 2020.
- Drought, aging infrastructure and rate fights are the three pressures on the system now.
The town’s first water company, 1878
A month after the announcement, the Star described what they’d built: a 24-foot-high, 225-foot-long earthen dam across York Canyon, west of town (St. Helena Star, August 23, 1878). It was constructed by Chinese laborers — by then about a thousand of them lived in St. Helena, roughly a third of the town’s population, working harvests, digging the winery tunnels at Schramsberg and Beringer, laying the rock walls that still mark the agricultural land (St. Helena Historical Society, “The Chinese Workforce in Napa Valley”). Their hands built the city’s first water system.
That dam, on the western flank of what would soon be called Spring Mountain, supplied St. Helena’s drinking water for the next eighty years.
Before the dam: the Wappo and the rancho
Before all that, the valley belonged to the Wappo. The village near the future town site was called Anakotanoma — “Bull Snake Village” — and the mountain at the head of the valley was Kanamota, “Human Mountain” (Napa Valley Vintners, “Saint Helena Appellation”). The Wappo lived along the creeks — Sulphur, York, Mill, Bell Canyon — and didn’t store water; they didn’t need to. Disease and the Mexican rancho system had broken their numbers by the 1830s, before American settlement got serious.
Edward Turner Bale, an English ship’s surgeon married into General Vallejo’s family, got 17,962 acres in 1841 as Rancho Carne Humana. His grist mill on Mill Creek, started around 1846, is the oldest surviving piece of water infrastructure in the area. After Bale died in 1849, his widow sold off pieces of the grant. In 1854, Henry Still and Charles Walters bought 126 acres and laid out the town, giving lots away to anyone who’d start a business. The city incorporated March 24, 1876.
For the first quarter-century, water came from wells, springs, and creeks — same as every small California town. Then 1878 happened, and the Star wrote it up.
Bell Canyon, 1959
By the 1950s, York Creek wasn’t enough anymore. The reservoir was filling with sediment, the town had grown, the post-war wine boom was about to start. So St. Helena built a new and much bigger reservoir — on the other side of the valley.
Bell Canyon Dam was completed in 1959, an earth-fill structure 95 feet high impounding 1,800 acre-feet on Bell Creek, which drains the Howell Mountain side at about 2,800 feet (California Department of Water Resources, Bulletin 17, 1968). It was the first time the city had storage measured in thousands of acre-feet.
It still wasn’t enough. Six years later, in 1965, the city applied to the State Water Rights Board to raise the dam thirty feet and add another 2,000 acre-feet. The application contains one of the better lines in the city’s regulatory record: “approximately one-third of the water stored in the Bell Canyon Reservoir cannot be used due to sulphides.” The expansion went through. Bell Canyon’s modern capacity is 2,350 acre-feet.
In 1992 and 1996 the city drilled the Stonebridge Wells as supplemental supply, capped at 20 percent of normal demand, 30 percent in drought. That’s the system today: Bell Canyon as primary, Stonebridge as backup, the Lower York Reservoir on a pre-1914 right kept around as non-potable raw water.
Taking down the York dam
The original 1878 York Dam took 27 years to come down.
In 1992, an uncontrolled sediment spill caught Fish and Game’s attention. A 1993 court order required the city to remove the dam and silt by November 1 of that year. Nothing happened. In 1997, Central California Coast steelhead — which the dam had been blocking from two miles of upstream spawning habitat — were listed as Threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act (California WaterBlog, “Small Dam, Big Deal,” November 2020).
In 2010, the city signed a settlement with NOAA Fisheries pledging removal by 2012. NOAA started fining the city $70 a day. By 2020, the unpaid fines were over $190,000. The Final EIR was approved in 2015 at an estimated $6.2 million. In February 2017, Water Audit California — a public benefit corporation run by Grant Reynolds — threatened to sue. The dam finally came down in 2020.
While that fight was unfolding, Water Audit also sued the city over Bell Canyon. The August 2016 complaint alleged the city had been over-diverting from Bell Creek for two decades — 1,500–1,600 acre-feet a year against permit limits. Mayor Alan Galbraith later confirmed it: when the city realized in the late 2000s that it wasn’t in compliance, diversions dropped to about 1,000 acre-feet, and St. Helena had to contract with the City of Napa for 600 acre-feet a year to make up the gap (Napa Valley Register, 2018).
Three pressures today
Drought: Bell Canyon’s safe yield in a critically dry year is about 850 acre-feet, well under normal demand. The 2012–2016 and 2020–2022 droughts both forced mandatory rationing.
Infrastructure: Bell Canyon Reservoir Intake Tower stabilization has sat on the city’s Capital Improvement Plan since 2005 with no work begun (Napa County Grand Jury, “St. Helena: Small Town, Big City Problems,” 2018–19). Napa County’s Measure A would have reimbursed $5.1 million; the deadline came and went.
Rates: ratepayers picked up what Measure A would have covered, plus the York Dam removal cost, plus the regular cost of running an old utility. The water rate fights of the 2010s are the latest chapter in a story that started when five winemakers chartered a private water company in 1878.
Frequently asked questions
Where does St. Helena’s water come from?
Primarily Bell Canyon Reservoir on Bell Creek, backed up by the Stonebridge Wells and, in shortfall years, water purchased from the City of Napa.
Who built the town’s first water system?
A company chartered in 1878 by five winemaking families, with the dam itself built by Chinese laborers in York Canyon.
What happened to the original 1878 dam?
After decades of disputes over sediment and blocked steelhead habitat, the York dam was removed in 2020.