One hundred and fifty years ago this week, a riverboat laden with sugar and other goods from New Orleans became the first vessel to make its way on the just-completed Illinois & Michigan Canal.
The boat was headed to Albany, N.Y.
The event, a milestone in the annals of inland water navigation within the United States, put Chicago and northern Illinois on the map.
Beginning Saturday, and for the next year, residents of the Chicago area–and all along the 96-mile canal route from Chicago to Downstate LaSalle-Peru–can learn more about the artificial waterway and its contributions to Chicago’s and Illinois’ growth.
In commemoration of the sesquicentennial, a variety of festivals, historical re-enactments, exhibits and lecture series will be held during the next year in Chicago and several other municipalities that owe their existence, at least in part, to the canal.
By linking the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, “It provided the rationale for the founding of Chicago,” said Michael Conzen, professor of geographical studies at the University of Chicago, and editor of the 10-volume “Studies on the Illinois and Michigan Canal Corridor.”
“Without the canal, it is unlikely that Chicago would have become the continental metropolis it has, and equally unlikely that northern Illinois would have developed as early and richly as it did,” Conzen wrote in a booklet on the canal published by Lewis University in Romeoville in 1987 in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of construction of the waterway.
On Thursday, southwest suburban Lockport kicked off the yearlong observance with a re-enactment of the opening-day celebration held on April 16, 1848, in that municipality when two canal boats, starting at opposite ends of the canal, met in Lockport.
The official opening of the canal’s 150th birthday party will be at Navy Pier in Chicago at 1 p.m. Saturday. It is to include the sealing of an I&M Canal time capsule with memorabilia from towns along the canal such as southwest suburban Summit, Willow Springs, Lemont, Romeoville, Lockport, Joliet, Channahon and Morris; and the unveiling of a poem about the canal written by Gwendolyn Brooks, Illinois’ poet laureate.
And as part of the sesquicentennial observance, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources on Monday will officially reopen a 15.1-mile stretch of the canal between Channahon and Morris that was left dry after a July 1996 flood wiped out 200 feet of the canal’s embankment in Channahon.
It took nearly a dozen years and thousands of men, mostly Irish immigrants, to build the I&M Canal, making it possible to ship cargo from the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, over to the Chicago River, out into the Great Lakes and over to the Eastern Seaboard.
“It completed a waterway link between New York City and the Mississippi River, at a time when shipping goods by water was the fastest and cheapest way to go, and made Chicago a major port,” said Lee Hanson, executive director of the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor Commission. The Lockport-based commission coordinates historical, environmental and recreational activities along the I&M Canal route, which was designated a National Heritage Corridor by Congress in 1984.
The canal transferred the Midwest’s shipping hub in the mid-19th Century from St. Louis to Chicago and, as a result, raised Chicago from a backwater trading settlement into a major commercial center and the gateway to the American West, Hanson added.
“In the first decade following the canal’s opening, the population of Chicago grew by approximately 500 percent,” he said.
Despite the many years it took to construct the canal and the impact it had on development in the northern Illinois region, its usefulness was short-lived. In less than a decade after it was completed, the railroads centered their operations in Chicago and usurped the waterway’s role as the key stimulus to Midwest growth.
In addition, the canal’s initial popularity among residents who settled along its banks from its starting point in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood to LaSalle quickly turned to disgust when engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1871, sending sewage that had been flowing into the Chicago River and out into Lake Michigan back up into the canal. The engineering fete did wonders for cleaning up the river and lake, but it turned the canal into a long, 60-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep smelly cesspool.
Moreover, its usefulness as a means of water transportation was virtually eliminated when a wider and deeper channel–the Sanitary and Ship Canal–was completed alongside the I&M Canal in 1900.
Today, the canal is a shadow of its original self. Because water no longer is regularly pumped into its channel, the canal frequently dries up in some sections, making travel over its entire route impossible even with a canoe. By contrast, when the canal opened, barges 100 feet long, pulled by mules walking alongside the canal, easily navigated the waterway.
In addition, long stretches of the original canal have been paved over for industrial use. And the first leg of the canal, which stretched between the South Branch of the Chicago River in Bridgeport to Harlem Avenue in Summit, lies buried beneath the Stevenson Expressway.
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Despite its brief and somewhat unsavory history, its construction, nevertheless, was momentous, Conzen said.
“It defined and etched the modern cultural character of the corridor between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River that since the dawn of human occupancy has served as an artery of interregional travel.”