When it comes to palisade, here are five things you should know, says Priscilla Walker, chairman of the Palisade Historical Society.
For more information on the history of Palisade, visit the new Palisade History Museum.
Peaches have been grown in the orchards in and around Palisade for more than 130 years.
The area’s warm days and cool nights make palisade peaches taste better than those grown elsewhere, said Walker, whose family has grown palisade peaches for generations.
Palisade peaches were commercially shipped to the Midwest in the 1940s-50s. At the height of this activity, up to 1.5 million bushels of peaches were shipped annually, Walker said.
Commercial shipping today accounts for about 40% of what it once was, in part because of a terrible frost in 1962-63 that destroyed orchards. Lots of growers grew their peach trees, she said.
In the decades that followed, a lot of land was divided and vineyards were planted. The roadside fruit stalls and peach sales that we know today also became popular, she said.
The Palisade area is one of the few commercial grape growing areas in the world that is more than 1,000 miles from an ocean, Walker said.
Grape growers here have different problems than elsewhere due to the altitude and climate, but the altitude and sunlight make for sweeter grapes, she said.
About 90% of Colorado’s grapes are grown in the Grand Valley American Viticultural Area (AVA), which includes Palisade, and the West Elks AVA in the North Fork Valley.
Most of Mesa County’s 27 wineries are located in the Palisade area.
The canals that run through the Grand Valley have their beginning in Palisade.
An important part of today’s canal system is the Grand River Diversion Dam, often referred to as the “roller dam,” built 106 years ago on the Colorado River in De Beque Canyon east of Palisade, Walker said. It diverts irrigation water, which is essential to agriculture and life in the Grand Valley.
The first canal to be completed in connection with the dam was the Grand Valley Canal, which carries water all the way to Fruita. The construction of further canals followed quickly.
The history of irrigation in the Grand Valley “is complicated and intricate,” said Walker.
Wayne N. Aspinall grew up in Palisade.
To know Aspinall means to know the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, the Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River and the “Aspinall Unit” on the Gunnison River, which includes the Blue Mesa Dam, the Blue Mesa Reservoir, Morrow Point Dam and Crystal. created dam.
Aspinall, who served Colorado in the US House of Representatives from 1949 to 1973, was the driving force behind legislation for this and other water storage projects.
“In the West, when you touch water, you touch anything,” said Walker.
Aspinall also coined the Wilderness Act of 1964 and other water and land laws in the west.
The federal building in downtown Grand Junction is named after him.
When looking at the picturesque orchards and vineyards surrounding Palisade, it’s easy to forget that one of the main players in the city’s history was coal mining.
Before Cameo was a shooting range, and before it was a power plant, it was the Cameo Coal Mine and one of more than a dozen coal mines in the area, Walker said.
From the 1880s to the first half of the 20th century, coal for palisade was as much an economic engine as agriculture, and many residents worked in both industries, she said.
The Cameo Coal Mine closed in 1969, the last to succumb to the changing times as more and more Americans began heating their homes with natural gas in the 1950s.
However, during its years of operation, Cameo produced a total of 1.2 million tons of coal, Walker said.
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