I have stood at the edge of a lot of swimming pools. But I have never stood at the edge of one and did not believe what I was seeing.

The pool at Balmorhea State Park in Toyahvale, Texas, an unincorporated community in West Texas, is fed by San Solomon Springs — an artesian spring that has been pushing water up from deep underground for thousands of years.

Water collects from the nearby Salt Basin, the Apache Mountains, and the Davis Mountains, traveling underground up to a hundred miles before forcing its way up through cracks in the limestone. That underground pressure creates what geologists call artesian flow. At Balmorhea, that flow gushes forth at roughly 15 million gallons per day.

The result is a pool that holds 3.5 million gallons at a constant 74 degrees. And it is so clear you cannot believe how deep it is.

The pool is approximately 28 feet deep, though it only looks like six. The water is so transparently crystalline that your brain keeps insisting the bottom is close enough to touch. It is not. People scuba dive in it. They have for decades.

Standing at the edge, it occurs to you that this water has been doing this for a very long time — long before the pool existed, long before Balmorhea was a park, long before the Spanish found their way to the Trans-Pecos.

The Mescalero Apache depended on these springs. Spanish explorers arrived and found something remarkable in the middle of a desert. Farmers in the region still depend on them today — San Solomon Springs supplies about 26 million gallons of water per day to the surrounding farmland, carried through canals to irrigate roughly 10,000 acres of crops. Without the springs, this corner of West Texas looks very different. Without the springs, it may not be habitable at all.

The pool itself was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps — CCC Company 1856 — during the Depression. President Roosevelt put young men without work. to build things that would last. Company 1856 arrived at Balmorhea in 1934.

What they did is remarkable. By hand, they produced 12,290 adobe bricks in just forty days — a National Park Service record. They harvested local limestone and hand-finished more than 30,000 square feet of stone for the pool alone. In five years, they constructed the double-winged pool, bathhouses, a caretaker’s residence, pergolas, a motor court, and all the park roads.

That pool — built by Depression-era young men, many of them teenagers, working by hand in West Texas heat — to create what is now recognized as the world’s largest spring-fed swimming pool.

I think about this whenever someone suggests that public investment in parks, infrastructure, or civic assets is wasteful. The pool at Balmorhea has been drawing visitors to this same crystal-clear spring water since 1934. The men who built it are gone. What they built remains, and it serves a new generation of visitors who have no idea it was constructed by young people who needed work during the worst economic crisis in American history.

That is what good governance looks like across time.

But here is what should concern every local government leader: springs like San Solomon are not guaranteed. Aquifer levels across the American West are dropping. Agricultural and residential demand keeps rising. The springs that made the Mescalero Apache stay, that the Spanish built settlements around, that farmers have depended on for a century — those springs require active protection.

You cannot assume a natural resource will still be there in fifty years simply because it has been there for five thousand.

The CCC built this pool to celebrate and protect something irreplaceable. The question for every community is the same: what are we building to protect what we have inherited?

To learn more about Balmorhea State Park and San Solomon Springs, visit tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/balmorhea.

About Ron on the Road

Ron Holifield speaks to over 2,000 local government officials annually and has coffee with over 250 local government officials each year as part of his travels. If you have a cool site you think he should visit, email Ron@CivicMarketplace.com. 

NOTE: This column was written with the assistance of Melissa Valentine, senior director of operations and support at Civic Marketplace. 

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