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The Tunnel under the Lake
The Engineering Marvel That Saved Chicago
By Benjamin Sells Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3474-4
CHAPTER 1
Buckets, Wells, and Water Carts
The year 1832 was an auspicious if also dark one in the history of both Chicago and the United States. At the time, Chicago was an unincorporated hamlet of only a few families living alongside the Chicago River. The most significant building was Fort Dearborn, a major military outpost on the south bank of the Chicago River that had been built to guard the already important port of Chicago. As the year dawned, no one could have envisioned what was to come or the impact that the year's events would have on the development of Chicago and on its long and arduous quest for pure water.
The Black Hawk War began in May of that year, and the federal government, fearing an attack on Fort Dearborn, decided to send reinforcements to the area. In June, President Andrew Jackson appointed General Winfield Scott to take command of the war, and Scott gathered about 950 troops from along the eastern seaboard to head west to Fort Dearborn. Two steamboats were chartered to transport the troops, and in late June the steamer Sheldon Thompson left from Buffalo, New York, with General Scott and his staff, six companies of artillery, and two companies of infantry. Shortly thereafter, on July 3, the steamer Henry Clay followed with seven companies of infantry.
It was a cursed voyage. The Henry Clay was barely under way when the troops began to fall sick. The stricken ship landed on July 7 near Fort Gratiot and the St. Clair River. Frightened soldiers fled the vessel, and many of them were later found dead in the surrounding countryside. By July 9, of the seven companies of infantry that had set sail just days before, only 68 men remained alive.
The Sheldon Thompson, meanwhile, had largely escaped the first days of virulence. But she would not escape unscathed. By the time the ship arrived in Chicago, on July 10, 76 troops had fallen sick and 19 had died. In all, of the original 950 men who had left Buffalo, only 350 made it to Chicago; disease and desertion took the rest.
The onboard killer was cholera, a scourge that would haunt and ravage the growing city, indeed the entire country, for decades to come. The ill-fated timing of Scott's voyage had coincided with the disease's arrival in the United States as one manifestation of a pandemic that was to take hundreds of thousands of lives around the globe. In New York alone, where the disease had arrived from Canada in June, over 3,500 people died out of a population of about 200,000.
It was a horrible disease, made even more fearsome by the severity and speed of its onset. People who woke up healthy were suddenly besieged with vomiting, diarrhea, and wrenching cramps and were dead by sunset. Severe dehydration often left the skin of the afflicted a deathly bluish-gray. So terrifying was the onslaught of cholera that thousands of people took flight from affected areas, hoping to outrun its reach. Some made it. Others, many, did not. Even worse, the doomed ones carried the disease with them in their flight, thus spreading the contagion to smaller towns and outposts, which in turn quickly succumbed.
When Scott's troops arrived at Fort Dearborn, the garrison, swelled by interest in the Black Hawk War, numbered about 1,000. The medical officer of the fort would later recount the "frightful havoc" of the disease, which in the end infected 1 in 5 and killed over 60. General Scott did his best to quarantine the fort, but the illness spread inexorably to the surrounding countryside. Of the troops that had originally set out from Buffalo to assist in the Black Hawk War, few ever made it to their appointed task.
Early on a connection was made between contaminated water and cholera, although the actual mechanism of transmittal was unknown. The discovery of bacteria and their role in disease was still decades away. The reigning theory in the early nineteenth century was that disease was carried and spread by "miasma," or noxious vapors, also called "death fogs" or "night air." The belief was that the miasma contained disease-carrying particles arising from filth, excrement, and decaying organic matter. The filth theory of disease basically said that if something smelled bad, it was bad for you. The response, then, was to try to get rid of the filth that gave rise to the bad smell.
This theory carried over to water. By the sanitation standards of the early nineteenth century, if water looked and smelled clean, it was assumed to be so. Conversely, foul-smelling water was to be feared, and for many years this fear drove much of Chicago's effort concerning sewerage and the water supply. Not until the 1880s would the filth theory be definitively replaced by the germ theory of disease.
In Chicago's earliest days, settlers had limited choices for obtaining water. Getting water from the river and the lake was straightforward but also cumbersome. Many early settlers simply took their pails to the closest source and collected water for their daily needs. Of course, that was an option only for people who lived close enough to the river or the lake. Other options included collecting rainwater, which had the benefit of purity and softness, and, in the winter, collecting melting ice and snow. As Chicago grew, however, the river and the easily accessible lake waters became contaminated with sewage and refuse from the city's industries. Similarly, smoke from homes and industries contaminated winter ice and snow and gave the water obtained from that source a creosote taste.
As it became more inconvenient, and undesirable, to get water directly from the river and the lake, private wells became ubiquitous. The natural geological conditions encouraged the use of private wells. The original level of the settlement was nowhere more than 12 feet above the level of the lake, and the riverbanks were only 2 to 3 feet above the surface of the river. The ground itself was a bed of sand left behind by the receding waters of the ancient lake that eventually became Lake Michigan. Below that was blue clay, which extended down about 100 feet to the underlying limestone bedrock. The soft surface sand, and the fact that one rarely had to dig more than 6 to 12 feet to hit water, made digging wells relatively easy.
Along with the need for clean water came the problem of how to properly dispose of black water (sewage) and gray water (household wastewater from cleaning, bathing, and the like). The same factors that made digging wells easy also made it easy to dig privy vaults to collect black water. Often, however, the vaults were dug too close to the wells that had been dug for a water supply. The vaults of the era were notorious for leaking, and contaminants from the privy vaults permeated the sand until they encountered the impermeable layer of clay, at which point their downward progress was halted and they flowed horizontally, finding their way into the wells. This problem was compounded by the habit of throwing garbage and gray water onto the ground so that those contaminants also found their way into the wells. As one early resident recounted, water drawn from the wells began to taste "a little brackish at first, then saltish, and finally it had a perceptible odor, which ultimately became offensive."
Before long, as Chicago's population exploded and its accessible waterways were fouled by the city's waste, the problems associated with contaminated water extended beyond private wells and privy vaults. How to dispose of waste while maintaining a fresh water supply became a defining question for Chicago's growth and development.
Chicago was incorporated as a town in 1833, and on November 7 of that year, with the specter of cholera hanging in every foul odor, one of the first ordinances passed by the town council was directed toward protecting the water supply. It was thereafter illegal to throw dead animals into the river, and violators were subject to a fine of $3. There soon followed ordinances forbidding the dumping of garbage into the river or onto vacant land, all in an effort to eliminate the dreaded death fogs. In 1834 the first board of health was established, and an ordinance was passed requiring every male over the age of twenty-one to assist in cleaning the streets, with a fine of $5 for noncompliance (by September 1834, when the cholera outbreak had subsided, this fine was reduced to $1).
As it became more and more difficult to obtain clean water from private wells and the river, local entrepreneurs came up with a new supply. In the 1830s and early 1840s, horse-drawn water carts supplied water to residents who preferred lake water over the more problematic well water and river water. Each cart held a large cask, and the watermen would back their carts down into the lake at the foot of Van Buren Street to get their fill. Then it was off to make their rounds, selling water to local residents at 5 to 10 cents a barrel. Originally water was dipped from the casks to fill customers' barrels, but later the water was dispensed through a 4-inch leather hose attached near the bottom of the cask. The water carts did a thriving business, given the impurities of the water obtained from private wells, and the inconvenience of trekking back and forth with pails to the river or the lake. Companies were organized and contracts were signed for routine delivery of water to residents and businesses. The water carts could be seen plying their trade into the 1850s.
Despite their industry, however, the watermen with their carts were no match for the exponentially growing demand for fresh water. The often tempestuous lake could make filling the casks impossible, and in periods of bad weather the water drawn from the lake was muddy with stirred-up sediment. Residents called out for options, and on November 10, 1834, just one year after Chicago was incorporated as a town, the city made its first foray into providing a public water supply. The town trustees authorized spending $95.50 to dig a public well at the corner of Cass Street (now Wabash Avenue) and Michigan Street (now Hubbard Street). Unfortunately, there was at that time no distribution system apart from the practice of people coming to the well to fill their own buckets and barrels, and so the public well was of real benefit only to people living nearby. Other Chicagoans still had to get their water from wells, the river, the lake, or the water carts.
By the end of 1835, Chicago was booming. The first census of Chicago, completed in 1835, showed "3,265 persons, 398 dwellings, 4 warehouses, 29 dry goods stores, 19 grocery and provision stores, 5 hardware stores, 3 drug stores, 19 taverns, 26 groceries (probably liquor stores) and 17 lawyer's offices." This was an almost tenfold increase over what had been reported barely three years earlier. Already the local population had endured the first decimating onslaughts of cholera. This fact, coupled with the inadequacy of the existing water supplies and the impracticality of using them, made it readily apparent that the days of wells and water carts were coming to an end. A more formal and systematic way had to be found to supply water to the growing population.
On January 18, 1836, the state legislature, by a special act, incorporated the Chicago Hydraulic Company. Curiously, the state legislature acted without any reference to the board of trustees or the residents of the town. There is no evidence that the trustees or residents were opposed to the plan, but the legislature's act of granting a private company access to public streets, and giving the company the right to use them, clearly implied the legislature's belief that such power belonged to the state legislature and not to the town.
The Chicago Hydraulic Company was given a seventy-year charter, and its capital stock was limited to $250,000. It was organized on March 19, 1836, with George W. Dole as president; Gurdon S. Hubbard, David Hunter, Gholson Kercheval, and William Forsythe as directors; and Edward W. Casey as secretary (other incorporators included James H. Campbell, R. A. Kinzie, and Solomon Wells). The original charter gave the newly formed company four years from the passage of the act to begin construction of a waterworks to supply the town with pure water.
A severe financial crisis hit the United States in 1837, temporarily derailing the Chicago Hydraulic Company's efforts to begin construction. It was not until 1840, when its four-year window was beginning to close, that the company finally began construction. Ira Miltimore was named machinist and superintendent of the work, and he began construction in 1840 of a reservoir at the corner of Lake Street and Michigan Avenue, south of the river.
The hiatus between the passage of the enabling charter and the beginning of construction led some residents to question whether the water supply should indeed be provided by a private entity. The City of Chicago had been officially incorporated on March 4, 1837, and many citizens believed, contrary to the legislature's assumption of its power to grant a private corporation access to and use of city property, that the city itself had the corporate authority to construct and run a waterworks under its own newly vested powers. In 1839, the Chicago Daily American warned against extending monopoly powers for supplying the city with water to any private company and expressed the hope that the city would soon turn its attention to providing water for its residents. The paper's view presaged the city's eventual takeover of the water supply.
After a fitful start, the new waterworks finally became operational in 1842. Residents assembled in great anticipation of the fateful moment when the trusty 25-horsepower pump would be fired up to provide the first public drink. It was a "gala day," and as the first trickle grew to a steady stream, "a great cheer went up." A new day had arrived in Chicago's quest for pure water.
By mid-1842, the Chicago Hydraulic Company had spent about $24,000 on the waterworks. A two-story brick building had been erected, with a pier running into the lake. The steam engine powered a double-action pump that had a working barrel 14 inches in diameter and a 44-inch stroke. Varying accounts described the suction pipe by which water was drawn from the lake as being between 14 and 18 inches in diameter, and between 320 and 700 feet long. The inlet pipe was laid on the top of the pier, with an elbow at the lake end that dipped down into the lake 5 or 6 feet. Water was pumped into two reservoirs whose capacity, by varying accounts, was said to be between 500 and 1,250 barrels. The distribution pipes were wooden logs bored out by hand, 5 inches for the main lines and 3 inches for the subordinate ones, and reinforced with iron hoops. (These early wooden pipes proved so durable that decades later they were still occasionally dug up in the process of other work and were found to be intact.) By June about 2 miles of pipe had been laid.
Although the new waterworks was a significant step forward, it initially served only the south side of Chicago and, later, a small portion of the west side. (From Chicago's earliest days, the river provided the defining nomenclature for the city. The main stem, running east to west, formed a T with the north and south branches. The north side and the south side of the city lay north and south, respectively, of the main stem, and the west side of the city was west of the axis formed by the north and south branches.) On March 1, 1845, the state legislature passed an act granting a charter to a new company, the Lake Michigan Hydraulic Company, to supply water to the city's north side. This action was again taken without any reference to the now formerly vested city government or its citizens. The initial incorporators were Thomas Dyer, William B. Ogden (Chicago's first mayor), William E. Ives, Walter L. Newberry, Henry Smith, Mahlon D. Ogden, John H. Kinzie, and John B. Turner. The act was not to take effect if the Chicago Hydraulic Company managed to begin building the works necessary to supply the north side within six months. In the end, the Chicago Hydraulic Company never did begin such construction, but neither did the Lake Michigan Hydraulic Company ever proceed with providing any water for the city.
In 1842, James Long entered into an agreement with the Chicago Hydraulic Company to oversee and maintain the company's pumping system for ten years, at no cost, in exchange for the right to use the steam engine's excess power to run a flour mill. To this end, he constructed the Hydraulic Mills at the corner of Lake Street and Michigan Avenue, near the lake. The agreement worked well for Long but was not without its hardships. In winter, for example, the pipes would become disarranged by the heaving of frost, and Long frequently had to spend hours throwing water on them to freeze up cracks before the pumps could be engaged. He also had to deal with fluctuations in the lake levels that sometimes left the end of the intake pipe out of water. Despite such hardships, however, the mill did a good business, and by 1848 it was producing fifty barrels of flour per day. It continued to thrive until 1853, when the city took over the waterworks.
The citizens were notably proud of their waterworks, and it is indisputable that the purity of its water supply was superior to that of the water available from private wells or from the river. This purity, however, did not come cheap. Costs ranged from $10 a year for families of no more than five persons to between $15 and $125 a year for boardinghouses (provided no baths or bathhouses were connected), and from $50 to $200 a year for taverns and hotels. At these rates, only a few hundred families could afford the new water supply.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Tunnel under the Lake by Benjamin Sells. Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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