Canals once laced the Sierra foothills and the mountains above, linking reservoirs and first carrying water for hydraulic and placer mining. When courts ruled hydraulic mining illegal in 1884 after floods caused by mining debris had devastated downstream lands and towns, the canal system found new life in irrigating orchard crops and later in carrying water to power plants. Wise Power Plant was one of those plants, built between 1913 and 1917 to generate electricity from water flowing from Fordyce and Spaulding lakes. It was connected to the PGE "Pacific Service" system on March 4th, 1917, and its electricity went to Stockton, then to Cordelia, and finally to the Bay Area, while the process also supplied water for irrigation of extensive deciduous fruit lands. The plant was named for James H. Wise, general manager of P.G.&E., who was in charge of the Lake Spaulding Power Plant. Its Pelton Doble turbine, or runner, built in 1915, was famed as the largest horizontal-shaft, single-discharge turbine in existence, appeared prominently in Machinery Hall at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco, and generated 20,000 hp when installed; it remains in operation today.