George & William Chaffey

Ontario, California owes its entire existence as a city to a pair of Canadian engineers named George Chaffey and William Chaffey, who designed and built the city from the ground up in 1882. In those days, construction was more complicated than simply hiring a slurry mixer from the local construction rentals shop and pouring concrete over everything. There were the matters of connecting it with the rest of the world and irrigation, which was especially important in the drier parts of inland California. To give you a proper appreciation of the achievements of these engineering brothers, we've compiled this article on their lives.

George Chaffey was born in Brockville, Ontario in 1848 and his brother, William, was born eight years later in 1856. Both brothers went on to become engineers and by 1880 George was well-known in Ontario for designing ships specifically to operate on the Great Lakes. It was a visit to his father in California that would broaden George's horizons to include such things as building construction and the operations of water treatment chemical suppliers. What had caught his attention was the system of irrigation in place in Riverside, California, which was built as an irrigation colony.

George and William Chaffey decided to try their hand at building an irrigation colony as well and moved to California with their web slings and other engineering and architecture related gear. In 1881 they bought land in inland Southern California from a Portuguese sea captain and established the test colony of Etiwanda. The pipe system George Chaffey engineered there would become the standard for irrigation systems in Southern California, where water is piped in from aquifers in the highlands to towns in the valleys. Etiwanda also made California history for having long distance telephone and electric lighting. Today, Etiwanda is a neighborhood of the city of Rancho Cucamonga.

One successful colony wasn't enough for the brothers, however, and throughout their lives they worked harder on their projects than a pair of automatic strapping machines. Their next projects were Ontario, California and Upland, California. They built both on the same model, wherein disputes with mountain communities over water were avoided by buying the land and setting up a mutual water company. They also endowed Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga and George's design for Etiwanda's electrical system earned him the presidency of the Los Angeles Electrical Company.

Though most of their earliest projects were in Southern California, the Chaffey brothers also undertook irrigation projects overseas in the Australian states of Victoria and South Australia. Renmark and Mildura, as these colonies were known, weren't as financially successful as the California colonies (they were suffering from a lack of MLM leads, no doubt) and this lead to the breakup of the brothers' partnership. William stayed and stuck it out in Mildura, which did eventually become a success. He died there in 1926 and both Australian towns erected statues in his honor. George returned to California and founded the town of Manzanar. He died in 1932.