Failed Attempts

Before making the bold move to reverse the river, the City took several measures to assure clean drinking water. In 1851, they extended a wooden water intake 600 feet into Lake Michigan. But pollution soon reached past it, as far as a mile into the lake.

In 1867, the City built a two-mile pipe (the longest tunnel ever bored at that time) to a water intake crib from which the City pumped its drinking water. However, the population increased tenfold in the next twenty years, and sewage pushed out past the crib, polluting the water again.

In 1871, engineers deepened the I & M Canal in an attempt to reverse the river. But even the great pumps at Bridgeport could not keep the water flowing down the canal.

By 1887, a special commission proposed three alternatives; one, discharge sewage into Lake Michigan near Calumet and bring drinking water from Evanston ($37 million); two, dispose of sewage on land ($58 million); three, permanently reverse the river with a new canal ($28 million).