Illinois & Michigan Canal

By http://www.sos.state.il.us/departments/archives/i&mpack/i&mex.html, Public Domain, Link

(I have not been able to find a map that shows where the locks and aqueducts are located.)

I've been putting off an overall description of the I&M Canal because the reason I write stuff is to learn about something, and I'm well aware of this canal. But I found a video that does the heavy lifting for me. (Note the picture at 3:31 is a mistake. That is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, not the I&M which was 60' across at the top, 36' at the bottom and 6' deep. [Hiking & Biking the I&M Canal National Heritage Corridor] (The irony is that the CS&SC helped make the I&M totally obsolete and caused it to close in 1933.) The canal was completed in 1848, but railroads soon started making it obsolete when the Rock Island was finished in 1853. It lost its passenger and regular freight business to the railroad. But, as is true of today's waterways, it retained the business of bulk freight.

It was the first National Heritage Corridor that was created. So it is easy to find plenty of other info on it.



A picture book by Joseph P. Balynas, The Illinois and Michigan Canal   A Photographic Journey, provided some details that I have not seen in most histories of the canal. I will use "JPB" in the references to this book.

I had noticed his pictures on Facebook, and I was glad to see he finally published some of them. The book is a "picture book" with one picture and a caption on each page. I normally avoid picture books because the captions usually contain a lot of redundant information, and they don't explain the subject very well. But this book was quite informative as well as "pretty." It is also small and affordable. Joseph also has a Flickr album of 304 photos. But I could not find one of his pictures that I remember was taken in the Canal Origins Park. I have driven to that park, but I could not figure out how to get to the park without risking life and limb trying to jaywalk across Ashland Avenue.

Lock #1 is in Lockport. In the initial plan, this was to be the first lock because the canal was to be cut at lake level from the South Branch of the Chicago River to here. The original plan was known as the "Deep Cut" plan. But they quickly devised the "Shallow Cut" or "Summit Level" plan. They built a lock and pumping plant at Bridgeport so that the canal started eight feet higher than the river. "A second 'summit level' lock would be constructed at Romeo (todays Romeoville) about 1/2 mile south of 135th Street to bring boats slightly down to Lockport level. Both locks were removed in 1871 when the Deep Cut plan was carried out in an effort to flush sewage from the Chicago River into the canal and then downstream to the Illinois River." [JPB, p 16] But the flow through the canal was too slow to flush the Chicago River, that is why the CS&SC was opened in 1900.

Each lock was 110' long and 18' wide. So the boats were 90-100' long and 17' wide. [JPB, p 22]

Lewis University Photo Collection

As I write notes about specific structures in and along the canal such as locks, aqueducts, grain warehouses, boat yard, etc.; I tag them with the "canalIM" label.