The Hurricane Canal, one of early Utah’s proudest stories of pioneer determination, was built completely by hand over eleven years at a cost of $60,000, much of it paid through winter labor by men earning shares in the canal company. The 7.5 mile canal clung to the sheer walls of the Virgin River Canyon, followed the Hurricane Fault, and encircled the flat farmlands of the Hurricane Bench, ultimately bringing water to 2000 acres of parched bench land and helping create the successful village of Hurricane. Pressed by the need for new land, the towns of Virgin, Mountain Dell, Duncan’s Retreat, Rockville, Grafton, Springdale, and Toquerville sought a way to get water to the bench despite the seeming impossibility of the task. In 1893, James Jepson and John Steele decided that a dam and canal could be built and rallied support for the project. By the end of June, a committee of six had investigated the canyon and returned a favorable report, after which the Hurricane Canal Company was created and held its first meeting in Toquerville Hall on July 11, 1893. At a stockholders meeting on August 25, County Surveyor Isaac MacFarland reported that the canal could be built, would be about 7.5 miles long, would require a dam fifteen feet high, and would irrigate about 2000 acres, and the company then moved to incorporate and begin construction. J. T. Willis was appointed superintendent of construction on November 15, 1893. Most work was done between November and May, when farm chores were lighter, with workers camping at the site and transients often laboring for their board. Because horse teams with plows and scrapers could be used only for a short distance near the dam, most of the canal was excavated by hand with wheelbarrows, picks, shovels, crowbars, and hand-driven drills to form a canal bed twelve feet across, eight feet wide, and four feet deep, carrying thirty-five cubic feet of water per second. The builders blasted twelve tunnels and constructed six wooden flumes, most later replaced by metal flumes. Though frequent floods and landslides washed out portions of the canal, it was kept in good repair by regular inspection and maintenance until it was replaced by the Quail Creek pipeline in 1985. On August 6, 1904, eleven years after work began, water flowed over the dam spillway, through the canal, and onto the Hurricane Bench, where a network of ditches crisscrossed the valley.