Tourism, to put it mildly, has never been Will County’s forte.
Sure, crowds show up every year to watch the horses trot at Balmoral Racing Club. And the small-time country stars that croon at the county fair in Peotone have been known to muster a sellout.
But when Chicago-area travelers set out to plan a summer vacation or even a day trip, this predominantly flat county of cornfields just isn’t on the map-literally, in many cases.
But that is all slowly beginning to change, thanks to a most unlikely attraction: an abandoned 150-year-old canal that for a short time carried barges and sewage from Chicago to the Mississippi River.
Forgotten for most of a century, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, opened in 1848, launched Chicago as the Midwest’s transportation center at a time when the city was little more than a village overlooking endless swamps and wild onion fields.
The canal allowed goods and people, for the first time, to travel by barge between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, bridging a key gap that had frustrated travelers for centuries.
Today the northern end of the historic 96-mile-long canal, which ran from Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood to LaSalle-Peru, lies filled in beneath the Stevenson Expressway.
But the southern end, from Summit to LaSalle, has become the centerpiece of a pioneering effort to spur the region’s economy-not with new industrial development but with the industrial development of centuries past.
In reviving canal towns, yellow dolomite limestone buildings that marked the waterway’s heyday are being restored as museums and restaurants. History festivals are being launched in towns like Lockport. Early steel blast furnaces near the canal’s edge in Joliet are being resurrected. And a network of recreational trails, built on the towpaths mules once trod, is being created to link all the sites.
“It’s not a Disneyland kind of approach, to create a restored village,” said Emily Harris, executive vice president of the non-profit Canal Corridor Association. “It’s an effort to create a living, breathing, economically vibrant region that’s attractive to visitors.”
Slowly, the visitors are responding. Tourism inquiries rose 205 percent last year, according to Sue Bobinsky of the Joliet-based Heritage Corridor Visitors Bureau. The corridor has been added to the tourism packages of Mississippi River-based paddlewheel boats. And at least 4 million people now visit the corridor or its adjacent state and county parks each year, according to the visitors bureau.
“Across the country, people are really looking for roots, to explore their own history and the history of the nation,” said Gerald Adelmann, a Lockport native and head of the Open Lands Project in Chicago, which fought to preserve the canal. “There are opportunities here to explore things you can’t find anyplace else.”
The canal’s revival began in earnest back in 1984, when it was named the nation’s first National Heritage Corridor following lobbying by Adelmann and Judith Stockdale, a former director of Open Lands.
That new federal designation was created to recognize and protect national landmarks associated with the country’s early industrial development, and has since been extended to other sites, including the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor between Providence, R.I., and Worcester, Mass.
But the Illinois and Michigan Canal Corridor’s history goes much further back than the 1800s. For centuries, the Potawatomi, Illini and older tribes traveled the corridor as the most direct route from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. During floods, they canoed the wetlands that linked the Chicago and Illinois Rivers; at other times, they slogged through the mud.
French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette, who faced similar problems bridging the gap, noted as early as the 1670s that a canal, cut through “but half a league of prairie” between the two waterways could provide year-round passage.
But the suggestion wasn’t acted upon until 1836, when the new state of Illinois launched construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal using primarily Irish laborers attracted through an advertising campaign in European newspapers.
Almost immediately, the canal ran into trouble. Just outside Lemont, the easily worked sandy soil turned to bedrock dolomite limestone that could be removed only by pounding an iron bar into cracks in the stone or by drilling holes with a brace and bit and then packing them with explosive black powder. Earth-moving equipment and dynamite hadn’t been invented.
Laborers, armed with little more than pickaxes and housed in unsanitary camps, died of cholera, malaria and accidents. The state of Illinois went broke during a depression in 1842. And a 141-foot drop in elevation between Chicago and LaSalle had to be bridged with a series of 15 limestone locks.
But the canal-6 feet deep, 60 feet wide and $5.7 million over its $750,000 budget-finally opened in 1848. It then served as the region’s main transportation link (and a conduit for Chicago’s sewage, once the Chicago River was reversed) until the 1890s, when railroads moved in and began carrying goods faster and cheaper.
Today, the canal and the towns along it are slowly returning to their former prominence. Lockport, once a hellraisers’ heaven of bars and bordellos frequented by canal workers, has had particular success.
At least 100 of the the town’s original limestone buildings, crafted from stone quarried from the canal bed, remain intact. The oldest is the Gaylord Building, built in 1836 to store canal-building materials and later converted to a store in 1859.
Named for an early shopkeeper and his grandson, philanthropist publisher Gaylord Donnelley, the building was completely revamped in 1987 and now houses an interpretive center, art gallery and upscale restaurant that overlooks the canal. Century-old graffiti remains on bits of the original walls.
The canal-front Norton Building, once the biggest grain processing plant in the region, also is being renovated into shops and condominiums. The Will County Historical Society has set up housekeeping in the canal’s original toll office. And a collection of period buildings, including a Homer Township schoolhouse and Mokena’s old jail, have been turned into a pioneer settlement on the canal’s banks.
“We’re setting the standard for what we hope others will do,” said Betty Nelson, a longtime Lockport history volunteer who leads visitors along a 2-mile canal-side trail edged with explanatory plaques.
A similar trail, open to bicyclists, hikers, snowmobilers and cross-country skiers, stretches from Channahon to LaSalle-Peru, past an old locktender’s house and Buffalo Rock State Park.
Within the next several years, canal supporters hope to bridge the gap between Lockport and Channahon with a new trail that will pass through Joliet and link in the city’s developing Heritage Park, which will showcase some of the country’s earliest blast furnaces and coke ovens, used in steel production.
That combination of attractions-a bikeable 80-mile trail, restaurants, historic sites and state parks-should prove a draw to more and more people, supporters believe, particularly Chicagoans taking increasingly shorter vacations and looking for an alternative to driving to Wisconsin.
“We see this as a logical marketing tool for the region,” Adelmann said. “The collection of resources collectively offer opportunities for tourism that maybe isolated sites alone didn’t.”
Not even the strongest supporters of the canal believe tourism will ever replace farming and industry as the economic engine of Will County. “It’s not the great panacea,” Adelmann said. “I’m not saying, `Close down the factories.’ “
But “it is an element of the economy,” he said, “and we should capitalize on every opportunity.”
“People say, `Tourism? Here?’ ” added Bobinsky, of the visitors bureau. “But tourism is someone who gets out of his car and buys a cup of coffee.”
