The Barber Dam is a timber-crib dam

Dam

A dam is a barrier that impounds water or underground streams. Dams generally serve the primary purpose of retaining water, while other structures such as floodgates or levees are used to manage or prevent water flow into specific land regions. Hydropower and pumped-storage hydroelectricity are...

 on the Boise River

Boise River

The Boise River is a tributary of the Snake River in the northwestern United States. It drains a rugged portion of the Sawtooth Range in southwestern Idaho northeast of Boise, as well as part of the western Snake River Plain...

 located about 3 mi (5 km) east of Boise, Idaho

Boise, Idaho

Boise is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho, as well as the county seat of Ada County. Located on the Boise River, it anchors the Boise City-Nampa metropolitan area and is the largest city between Salt Lake City, Utah and Portland, Oregon.As of the 2010 Census Bureau,...

. The dam was constructed by the Barber Lumber Company between 1904 and 1906 to serve as a mill pond

Mill pond

A mill pond is any body of water used as a reservoir for a water-powered mill. Mill ponds were often created through the construction of a mill dam across a waterway. In many places, the common proper name Mill Pond name has remained even though the mill has long since gone...

 for timber. A power plant was also constructed in conjunction with the dam which powered the mill and the town of Barberton (Barber), which was established in 1910. In 1934, the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

 effected the closure of the mill and the facilities were purchased by Boise Cascade

Boise Cascade

Boise Cascade Holdings, LLC, which uses the trade name Boise, is an American pulp and paper company, ranked as the thirteenth largest forest products company in the world....

. The Harris Ranch purchased the dam and mill after the depression and developed the area for residential property.
The dam was purchased by Ada County

Ada County, Idaho

Ada County is a county in the southwestern part of the U.S. state of Idaho. As of the 2010 Census, the county had a population of 392,365. The county seat and largest city is Boise, which is also the state capital. Other cities in the county with over 10,000 residents include Meridian, Eagle,...

 in 1977 and is currently operated by the Idaho Department of Water Resources. The run-of-the-river dam's power house contains two Kaplan turbine

Kaplan turbine

The Kaplan turbine is a propeller-type water turbine which has adjustable blades. It was developed in 1913 by the Austrian professor Viktor Kaplan, who combined automatically adjusted propeller blades with automatically adjusted wicket gates to achieve efficiency over a wide range of flow and...

 generators with a combined capacity of 4.14 MW and is operated by Enel Green Power. The dam and lumber mill were added to the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

on November 21, 1978.