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In Rocky Ford, watermelons, ditches and the Arkansas River tie a community to its past and inform its future by Tracy Ross
https://coloradosun.com/2025/10/21/rocky-ford-arkansas-river-watermelons-ditches/
The longest-running fair in Colorado has provided tax dollars and identity to a region that has struggled economically. But recent projects in the works have the town’s future in mind while borrowing from the past.
Tracy Ross3:30 AM MDT on Oct 21, 2025
Fourteen tons of Rocky Ford watermelons were given away during the 148th Arkansas Valley Fair in August. The three-day exhibition celebrates the lower Arkansas Valley’s prized juicy fruit. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
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ㅤ⚲ㅤ ROCKY FORD
Conjure a Colorado sports event and what do you see?
Giant slalom? Maybe.
Football? Obviously.
Bike races over three passes. Trail races winding 50 miles.
But horses storming a river while their riders try to hang onto a watermelon?
Sally Cope is manager of the Arkansas Valley Fair, and her dad did it. He was a contestant in the fair’s Watermelon Derby race, started in 1950. Riders had to hang on — to mane, to melon — while the horses splashed through the Arkansas River to its far bank and back. Then they had to lap the rodeo arena in front of thrilled and clapping fans.
“Holding on wasn’t too hard when the watermelons were dry,” Cope said, “but they got real slippery when they were wet.”
Melons, the fair and the Arkansas are why the city of Rocky Ford as we know it exists today.
Cope can prove it with historical records.
The Utes inhabited the area first. The Arapaho moved in next. The Comanche pushed the Arapaho out, and we know the history of white settlement after that.
The Rocky Ford Historical Museum recounts the story of “a genial man who moved alone to the West” finding “a land full of dreams but devoid of settlers.” George W. Swink landed in Bent County in 1871, hand-dug the Rocky Ford Ditch and settled near Rocky Ford, which Kit Carson namedwhen he tried to ford the Arkansas and found it full of rocks. Swink planted cantaloupe and watermelon seeds and officially built those into key industries in the region.
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So maybe Swink, his melon seeds and the Arkansas are why Rocky Ford exists.
The story picks up in September 1878 when Swink produced a bumper crop of melons. He took them to the railroad depot, sliced them up and placed the juicy disks on a boxcar door laid horizontal. Around 2,530 people tasted those melons. It was such a joyous occasion, Swink decided watermelon needed its own festival. So he started the Arkansas Valley Fair, and it’s been running annually every year since.
Rocky Ford hosted the 148th Arkansas Valley Fair in August; it’s the longest continuous fair in Colorado. The three-day exhibition is renowned for its Watermelon Day, when the fair gives away a free Rocky Ford watermelon to anyone willing to wait in line for one. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The longest-running fair in Colorado has given sales-tax dollars and a sense of identity to a region that has struggled economically, with a falling population, big-city buyouts of agricultural water and a belief that Colorado leaders know it’s there but don’t really care.
But a recent study showed the historically disadvantaged side of town the fairgrounds inhabit has a shortage of playgrounds for kids, and Rocky Ford leaders wanted to fix it.
So in 2022, they started envisioning a way they could use 100 acres encompassing the fairgrounds and land around it to anchor not only a playground for the children, but a regional park for camping, fishing and hiking, a trail system along the Arkansas River for bird watching, biking and horseback riding, and a “community living room hub” for people to gather in both when the fair is on and off. The vision includes repairing crumbling parts of the rodeo arena and fairgrounds including adobe stalls.
The projects would have obvious links to Swink, the Ark and the fairgrounds. They show a community trying to enhance its future by drawing on its history.
It also began with beets
That ditch Swink dug? It still shares Rocky Ford’s name and runs alongside the Arkansas River.
It’s owned by the Rocky Ford Ditch Company, which was incorporated in 1888. Water from it irrigated Swink’s melons, corn, wheat, alfalfa, cows and sugar beets that for a long time were the most profitable crop growing in the valley.
In 1899, beets were booming and Swink wooed the American Crystal Sugar Company into building a processing plant in Rocky Ford. The Holly Sugar Corporation, founded in 1905 by Kenneth Schley, set up shop in the town 100 miles to the east and later expanded with a second large sugar beet factory in the town of, wait for it, Swink.
Bill Hancock grew up on a small farm just outside of Rocky Ford. He likes thinking about the years sugar beets drove the economy, from the 1900s through the 1950s. “The factories were the hook and bullet of this community,” he says.
The corporations bought beets that farmers grew in fields fanning away from the Rocky Ford Ditch. They irrigated the fields with Arkansas River water. Everything was flowing. Rocky Ford High School, home of the Meloneers, had 160 students. Locals patronized three grocery stores, four banks, two women’s clothing shops and three car dealerships.
The main street buzzed with activity. “My family would go there Saturday evenings for supper and watch all the goings on,” Hancock remembers. “The shops stayed open until 10 o’clock. It was busy, busy, busy.”
Four-year-old Waylon Mills’ family has deep ties to the land in Otero County, going back four generations. The financial pressures on farmers to constantly expand their business coupled with persistent concerns about water sales make a future in farming in the lower Arkansas Valley a challenging one. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The farmers also employed workers from Mexico, who bought goods from Hancock’s uncle’s clothing and Army surplus stores. They’d pack them in footlockers his uncle sold, and when one filled up, “he’d put a padlock on and a tag on and take it down to the train station and ship it to Mexico,” he said. “It was nifty, and most of the vendors learned enough Spanish to get along.”
But the region took a blow in 1974, when Congress allowed the Sugar Act of 1934 to expire and President Gerald Ford lifted tariffs on sugar imports, which flooded the market and killed the Lower Arkansas Valley’s largest industry.
“When the sugar company went out of business, they leased the land to Natco Food Service, which grew hay on it that they made into dehydrated pellets” Hancock said.
That kept the economy limping along for a little while.
Then the water brokers came to Rocky Ford.
Buying and drying
Acres of land along the Rocky Ford Ditch are fallow after Aurora bought them to water the city.
Kristie Knackord, with the Lower Arkansas Water Conservancy District, says there’s “a thought, conveyed out there publicly, that a farmer sold their water directly to the municipality. But often there’s a middle man, and how does that work?”
It works by a water broker visiting a place like Otero County after its local industry collapses. They find landowners with rights to water, and buy the water and the land. The transfer of water from farms to cities actually began in the 1890s. “But the pace of sales quickened in the 1970s and 1980s as Aurora, Colorado Springs and Pueblo found willing sellers in farmers who were struggling because of high interest rates and low commodity prices,” according to Water Education Colorado.
Hancock remembers when the Bowlen family, who owned the Denver Broncos from 1984 to 2022, sent brokers on behalf of the city of Aurora. Pat Bowlen was also the principal of Resources Investment Group, which purchased 4,100 acres of farmland and 424 shares of the Rocky Ford Ditch.
It all started in 1979, when Crystal Sugar shuttered its processing plant in Rocky Ford and the company gave local farmers an option to buy it. When they couldn’t raise the money, Bowlen’s group snapped it up – for the water rights. They turned around and sold them to Aurora.
Riders ford the Arkansas River while trying to hang onto a watermelon, circa 1960. The Arkansas Valley Fair Watermelon Derby started in 1950. Watermelons define the fair to this day. (Courtesy Sally Cope)
Some farmers were persuaded to sell their land and water rights, “but there was still maybe a third of the water that didn’t sell,” Hancock said. Farmers who wanted to stay held onto their rights for a number of years. But the pressure around Rocky Ford didn’t let up and many more of his neighbors sold.
By 2009, municipal purchasers had bought water rights attached to more than 102,000 irrigated acres in the Arkansas Basin and more than 150,000 acre-feet of water was severed from the land, according to Water Education. That was the start of the most recent “buy and dry,” as the pattern is called.
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Jack Goble, general manager of the Lower Arkansas Water Conservancy District, says his group doesn’t know how many acres have been affected in Otero County but that Aurora “dried up around 7,500 acres on the Rocky Ford Ditch.” The district is working on a project that will give them the complete number in a few months.
Meanwhile, Hancock holds onto another set of happy memories from his childhood.
Back when the water was flowing, the Hancock kids frequented the rodeo where Cope’s dad wrestled the watermelon.
“We had an open arena at the fairgrounds. That was before horse trailers,” he said. “So we’d saddle up and ride to town and then rope and then ride home in the dark. The folks would follow us in their car to make sure somebody didn’t get run over. We belonged to the Mill Iron Wranglers. It was a horse drill team like the Lakewood Westernaires. We got contracted to go to a lot of the local rodeos, set flags and be the entertainment.”
Some holdouts still have rights to water in Rocky Ford Ditch, he said. “There’s the (Colorado State University Agricultural Experiment Station) and a few other little farmers and backyard people.”
Rocky Ford has some water rights as well, says City Manager Stacey Milenski. Which brings us back to the town, melons and the revitalization project.
Watermeloning and watering the future
Watermelons are still so central to Rocky Ford the city is known as the Sweet Melon Capitol of the World. Since George Swink gave travelers a sugar high with his free slices, the Rocky Ford Rotary Club has given away 7 million pounds. Rocky Ford High School’s mascot is the Meloneer, described as “a muscular, anthropomorphic watermelon.” Same name for the school paper.
So in 2021, during the city’s initial visioning process, Electra Johnson suggested they give either the new entrance to the fairgrounds a watermelon theme or make the new playground melon-themed. Johnson’s firm, EJD+P, specializes in regenerative, community-driven solutions to restore landscapes, empower people and build resilient futures for Colorado’s communities.
When the city thought about how they could give the community more access to nature and recreation, they zeroed in an area called Crystal Lake, a parcel of land between the fairgrounds and the Crystal Sugar Factory property that has the dry depressions of three holding ponds once used by the plant.
Some community members thought cleaning and revegetating the Crystal Lake area and piping Rocky Ford Ditch water into one of the holding ponds would give kids who live on the north side of town somewhere to run, hike, splash and connect with nature during the summer, Johnson added.
Arkansas Valley Fair Manager Sally Cope, left, presents a Rocky Ford watermelon to Jeannie Swink-Johnannes during Watermelon Day Aug. 16 at the fair. Swink-Johnannes is the great-great-granddaughter of G.W. Swink, the man who originated Watermelon Day during the late 19th century and played a major role in the developing the melon industry in the lower Arkansas Valley. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
And Johnson imagined connecting the Crystal Lake recreation zone to the Arkansas River, “the lifeblood of this area, but with no public access to it,” she said. “So the master plan included 33 acres of Crystal Lake, 33 acres of fairground and 33 acres next to it, which is a wetlands.”
It all sounded so grand, so doable with enough community buy-in, belief and funding. Johnson said the various pieces would help solve some racial disparity in Rocky Ford. “I mean the fair is a place where everyone comes together,” she said. And if a trail could link the fair to Crystal Lake, and Crystal Lake to the Arkansas River, even more equity could come out of the city’s plan.
Then the reality set in. Completing any part of this project was going to be wildly expensive, Milenski told The Colorado Sun.
“If you just do, you know, red slides and one of those standard playgrounds, it’s still $300,000,” Johnson said.
Since the city started dreaming, they’ve received three grants including two from Great Outdoors Colorado for $50,000 and $400,000, and one from the Colorado Health Foundation for $50,000 Johnson said.
But even receiving money has been a struggle, said Milenski. “We announced we got these planning dollars and the community thinks, ‘They got $400,000? I don’t see any change. What are you doing? You’re not fixing the streets with that money,’ There’s that misconception anytime you get a grant, but what you can do with it and what you can’t is very specific.”
The city is also looking at a “tough year in 2026, because people aren’t spending money,” she said. “Sales tax isn’t going to be what was projected. And property taxes remain flat.”
But Johnson calls the project an answer to “a dream from the community and the town that would be a wonderful way of transforming the region.”
And she calls creating access to the Arkansas River specifically, “a dream and vision that would have to be managed by a land trust or someone like The Nature Conservancy, because the land is super fragile from being over grazed for years. The city of Aurora owns the land and water, but the group we’ve been working with would like to see the land bought back and turned into a state park or managed as a grassland wildlife corridor.”
It would have to have some political firepower behind it, she said. “Gov. Jared Polis has been interested in the region, but a governor has not come to the (Wake Up Breakfast) that kicks off the Arkansas Valley Fair since Roy Romer.”
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Type of Story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Tagged: Arkansas River, Rocky Ford, What is a river?
Tracy RossRural Reporter
Tracy Ross writes about the intersection of people and the natural world, industry, social justice and rural life from the perspective of someone who grew up in rural Idaho, lived in the Alaskan bush, reported in regions from Iran to Ecuador... More by Tracy Ross