Jefferson County, CO Photo - Water Spills Over The venerable Cheesman Dam-

Water spills over the venerable Cheesman Dam in Jefferson County, Colorado. Cheesman is one of the dams that slows and captures water from the South Platte River for use as part of Denver's drinking-water supply. Cheesman Dam, which was named for Walter Scott Cheesman -- a Denver druggist, railroad builder, and designer of water infrastructure -- was the world's tallest at 221 feet when it was completed in 1905. Cheesman was the first reservoir of Denver's mountain storage facilities that helped expand Denver Water's system. Built by immigrant stonemasons, the dam remains, after more than 100 years, the workhorse of the storage system and jewel among the Denver Water utility system's dams. Except for a small finger of the reservoir where fishers are allowed to try their luck, the dam and its vast reservoir are tightly secured and off-limits to human visitors, their boats and camping equipment, and their animals.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange.

Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.