blindelof@sacbee.com
Published Friday, May. 22, 2009
RIO VISTA – For all of Dick Brann's life, the water tower has been perched along the banks of the Sacramento River.
The 132-feet-tall tower has been as much a part of the river town's identity as striped bass or the nearby lift bridge.
When you saw the tower from boat or car – and you could for miles away in the flat-as-a-pool-table Delta – you knew Rio Vista was near.
"It's a landmark," he said.
Brann never saw the water tower being built even though he grew up here. After all, he's only 92. The water tower is more than a century old.
The bottom tank of the two-tank tower supplied water for drinking, and the top one fed a flume that transported asparagus into a cannery.
During canning season, the river was white with floating "asparagus buds," the discarded ends of the vegetable.
On Thursday, Brann and other Rio Vista residents watched history as the tower started to come down. At a minute before 4 p.m. the top tank was lifted off and then placed on the ground.
"It's pretty spectacular," said Sue Schaber, program manager for the Discover the Delta Foundation.
The remaining lower tank and tower looked pretty squat, she said. Even though the entire tower will be disassembled, it won't become steel scrap for China.
After refurbishment, plans are to put it on a barge and take it across the river to be erected again as part of a Delta history and tourist center and farmer's market planned by the Delta Foundation.
According to the foundation, the tower dates to 1904 when the property was used by Rio Vista Canning and Packing.
Sometime between 1910 and 1920, the property was sold to Del Monte and the on-site cannery was called California Packing Corp. Plant No. 22, or Calpak.
It was considered the largest asparagus cannery in the world. Ninety percent of the world's canned asparagus, mostly white asparagus, was packed there.
In the early 1950s, Blackwelder Manufacturing Co. bought the property but only used the lower tank to supply drinking water for the site.
In the mid-1960s the tower, feeling its age, sprang some leaks and was no longer used to supply water.
In 1990, the Dutra family took over the property and emblazoned the company name on the upper tank. It recently donated the tower to the foundation.
