ORIGIN - Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal at South Branch Of Chicago River
Posted by: 
adgorn
N 41° 50.689 W 087° 39.955
16T E 444716 N 4632761
The Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal was completed in 1900 to help flush contaminated water from the drinking supply, plus provide a navigable route from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.
Waymark Code: WM8R4R
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 05/05/2010
Views: 5
As Chicago was growing in the late 1800s, flood waters flushed pollution into Lake Michigan contaminating the drinking water supply, leading to thousands of deaths from waterborne disease. The Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal was completed in 1900 to help reverse the flow of water drainage from Lake Michigan into the Illinois River, thus protecting the Lake Michigan and providing clean lake water to dilute the pollution in the rivers.
The canal begins here and is spanned by the Ashland Avenue bridge.
From Britannica at (
visit link)
"U.S. waterway linking the south branch of the Chicago River with the Des Plaines River at Lockport, Illinois. It has a length of 30 miles (48 km), a minimum width of 160 feet (50 metres), a minimum depth of 9 feet (2.7 metres), and 2 locks.
The chief purpose of the canal, conceived in 1885, was to reverse the flow of the Chicago River away from Lake Michigan in order to halt pollution of the lake waters by the city’s sewage. Construction of the canal was the largest earth-moving operation undertaken on the North American continent up to that time..."
From (
visit link)
"What is now the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal started out as the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848. This was a lengthy (96 miles) water route from the Chicago River at Bridgeport to the Illinois River at LaSalle-Peru. It included seventeen locks and, like the Erie Canal, had paths on either side where the mules and their attendants walked as they pulled the boats. In the 1880’s, it became apparent that the sewage disposal method utilized by the City of Chicago (pumping into Lake Michigan) had become inadequate. A drainage canal, eventually called the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, was built largely parallel to the Illinois and Michigan Canal. It was much larger than the old canal and involved an actual reversal of the flow of the Chicago River. In addition to serving as a conduit for sending Chicago’s processed sewage down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, the new canal (24 miles long, about 200 feet wide, and about 24 feet deep) also serves as a navigation link between the Great Lakes and the Illinois-Mississippi basin. This link now supports a fairly substantial tug and barge industry. Numerous businesses have been established along the canal and on nearby waterways that rely on this transportation link."
From (
visit link) ,
a pictorial history of building this canal:
"Work began in 1892 on the easternmost section of the canal, 7.8 miles running from the South Branch of the Chicago River to Summit, from the South Side of the City of Chicago to suburban Cook County. Located on the Chicago Lake Plain, this section was built through layers of soil. Improvements included dredging sections of the South Branch of the Chicago River to allow for larger ships to pass, as well as to deepen the river to assure that water would flow southwestward away from Lake Michigan. The easternmost section of the canal was dug through layers of soil. In contrast to the building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in the 1840s where virtually all of the digging was done by hand, steam shovels played an integral role in the construction of the Sanitary and Ship Canal."
The old origin of the I&M Canal (no longer extant) is just to the south and has recently been memorialized with a park.