Editor's note: In July, we will be celebrating our 30th year of covering this community. As we proudly approach that mark, we'll be checking our archive for a few favorite features. Here's a story from the Jan. 13, 1999 issue of Wednesday Journal.
Sometime this spring - probably late April or early May - new signs will go up in Oak Park marking the location of the Continental Divide.
Say what?
No kidding. The Continental Divide runs right through the middle of Oak Park. A continental divide would be more accurate. There are several, as it turns out, separating the various water basins that make up the North American continent. Depending on where you're located, rainfall drains into the Pacific, the Atlantic or - and this is what most people don't immediately recognize - the Gulf of Mexico.
Oak Park happens to be part of the divide that historically separated water flowing down the Mississippi to the Gulf from that which flowed through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean.
All of this has to do with the receding glaciers of the last Ice Age and such, about which most people possess only a superficial knowledge - as opposed to someone like, say, Bill Dring.
For the past couple of years it has been Bill Dring's mission to raise local awareness of Oak Park's Continental Divide.
Dring has been interested in this subject since he was a kid, growing up on the north side of town, and living on the ridge.
For those unfamiliar with "the ridge," it is a clearly defined "geophysical" feature that turns out to be more than just a blip in the landscape. It's how Ridgeland Avenue got its name. In fact Ridge-land was a separate community in the 1870s.
It's also the reason Oak Park used to be called Oak Ridge. Everyone knows there's a "hill" in Scoville Park and another at Taylor Park, and if you traveled a direct line between them, you'd find plenty of sloping streets that fall off in different directions.
Believe it or not, that's our very own continental divide.
Dring, for one, thinks that's very cool, and when he retired three years ago from the Chicago architectural firm of Bauhs-Dring-Main (they did the Oak Park Club and Scoville Park Apartments), the subject became a minor obsession, and he threw himself into researching it at the Newberry, Oak Park and Chicago libraries. Thanks to Dennis McClendon at Chicago Cartographics, he finally located a 1927 map by one F.M. Fryxell which showed the continental divide running through Oak Park.
What he learned through his research was that Oak Park's ridge once upon a time marked the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The elevation is 630 feet, whereas the current Chicago shoreline is situated only 585 feet above sea level. The elevation of the Oak Park ridge created a high-and-dry alternative to both the swampland extending to Lake Michigan on the east and the Des Plaines River floodplain immediately to the west. And that made it a good place to settle back in the 1830s.
The Chicago lowlands, on the other hand, presented problems for the burgeoning urban center in the second half of the 19th Century. Sewage dumped into the Chicago River ended up in Lake Michigan, which was the source of the population's drinking water. The construction of the Illinois & Michigan Canal in the 1840s attempted to bridge the divide and send both shipping and sewage toward the Mississippi River Basin, where the sewage could be diluted as it headed toward the Gulf of Mexico. The I&M Canal extends some 96 miles, starting at Bridgeport on the Chicago River and running parallel to the Des Plaines River until it meets the Illinois River near LaSalle-Peru. The canal crossed the continental divide some five miles south of Oak Park at Chicago Portage (located near Harlem Avenue and 47th Street), which happened to be the spot where Marquette and Joliet portaged from the Des Plaines to the Chicago River on their return trip up the Mississippi in 1673. The French called it
"Le portage de Checagou" after the wild onions growing in the area, Dring says. "Chicago was named after the portage, not the other way around."
The canal generally served its purpose, but it wasn't fool-proof. Pumps were able to divert sewage into the canal from the Chicago River, but heavy rains could overwhelm the system, as it did in 1854 and 1885. The resulting pollution of the lake's drinking water led in each case to cholera epidemics that killed thousands.
As a result, a second canal was constructed using a system of locks that finally reversed the flow of the Chicago River - in effect reversing the water basin.
When the Sanitary and Ship Canal opened in 1900, the continental divide here was rendered obsolete. "Now all the water runs to the Gulf," Dring says.
In spite of the fact that we were basically sending all of Chicago's sewage downriver, the move was a popular one (except in St. Louis, which complained bitterly) and actually improved overall water quality in the region. The sudden influx of fresh water flowing from Lake Michigan through the Chicago River to the Great Sanitary Canal (as it was called then) oxygenated the smaller river systems and helped decrease disease rates. As Dring puts it, "The Great Lakes flowed unimpeded into the Mississippi River basin again for the first time in 12,000 years."
The opening of the canal 99 years ago this Sunday attracted the world's attention, rivaling the later Panama Canal (which borrowed many of the techniques pioneered here). Dring says it dominated newspaper coverage around the world for a full week.
All of which is neither here nor there (so to speak) as far as the Oak Park ridge is concerned. Or as far as Bill Dring is concerned for that matter. Obsolete or not, Dring says the Oak Park continental divide is still deserving of note - deserving even of celebration. So he's been trying to get the local powers that be to take note of it for the past couple of years.
He appeared before the village's Historic Preservation Commission and wrote letters to the local papers in November of 1997 stating that "we sit astride an important natural feature of our continent" and urging local officials "to recognize and celebrate Oak Park's Continental Divide by erecting appropriate signs at the major streets which cross the line."
Village officials may have been underwhelmed by his suggestion, but local dentist Ron Felt, a member of the local Rotary Club, took it seriously enough to invite Dring to put together a slide presentation based on his research and deliver his spiel at one of their luncheons.
It was a hit, and Rotary's Community Service Committee adopted the project, giving final approval in December to fund five continental divide signs at strategic points along the ridge.
The first will be located on North Avenue in the strip mall just west of Ridgeland. Number two will be found at the northwest corner of Taylor Park, where Berkshire and Elmwood intersect. Dring, by the way, says this is the best place to see the slope of the ridge (the second best is looking west down Ontario Street from Grove Avenue). Sign number three will be installed on Chicago Avenue near Linden, with number four in Scoville Park and the final one at Forest and Lake Street by 100 Forest Place.
Bill Planek, who chairs Rotary's Community Service Committee, says the project is consistent with one of their primary focuses, which is to complement the village's signage program by sponsoring signs that highlight locations of interest within Oak Park. In addition to making local residents more aware of their heritage, he says, the project, they hope, will help cut down on the number of unfamiliar outsiders who get off the Lake Street el and wander aimlessly trying to find the Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright sites they came to see.
Putting up five signs, however, is more complicated than you might think. The two-foot by three-foot signs are being designed by graphic artist David Anderson, will be produced by Warning Lights Inc. (the low bidder) and have information both front and back. The front will read in large letters, "Continental Divide - Historical Boundary" against a blue background. The back will show a map of the U.S., the water basins divided by color, and a text, written by Dring, which begins, "You are standing on a Continental Divide."
In addition to the signs, a brochure is also being prepared by Dring. The total cost of the project is about $5,000, and still consumes 10 to 15 hours of his time per week coordinating it.
Dring is happy with the way his dream is being realized and encourages other communities along the divide to follow suit. Though his other interests (which include lots of travel with his wife, Jan, a retired travel agent) limit his availability, he would be willing to present his slide lecture to other interested organizations.
But mostly he just wants local residents to appreciate their hometown's "physiography," which is a whole lot more interesting than most of us "flatlanders" would ever have guessed.
