Remembering the Waterways for the Illinois Bicentennial

Transcription

1 April 2018 Local maritime news, events and history from the Chicago Maritime Museum Remembering the Waterways for the Illinois Bicentennial Two hundred years ago, on December 3, 1818, Illinois became the 21st State in the Union. CMM has been officially endorsed by the Office of the Illinois Bicentennial for promoting the proud history of our statehood. Read our boundary history below and you ll discover -- it s all about the water. By Theodore J. Karamanski, CMM Operations Board member and Loyola University Chicago history professor.

2 The boundaries of Illinois and the history of Illinois are intimately linked to the waterways of the Prairie State. The Mississippi River, which marks the state s western limit, was also the site of the first penetration of what is now Illinois by the Europeans. In 1673, Louis Joliet, Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette, and their companions, paddled two canoes downstream in search of an outlet to the Pacific Ocean. Their journey took them passed Cahokia, which hundreds of years earlier had been the site of the largest Native American city. Their return route was made easier by Illinois Indians who told them of a shorter route to the Great Lakes via (what are now called) the Illinois and Chicago rivers. Louis Joliet was quick to grasp the significance of this easier path from the inland seas to the great valley of the Mississippi. He wrote, somewhat over optimistically, it would only be necessary to cut a canal through half a league of prairie to go in a bark by easy navigation from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico. To the south and east the Ohio River and its tributary, the Wabash, not only mark the state s boundaries but were critical to the early Anglo-American settlement of Illinois. Flat boats and keel boats were used in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to bring migrants from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania to Illinois. Some of the state s first substantial towns developed along the Ohio River. One telling anecdote from that time recounts how settlers at far north Chicago journeyed down to the Shawneetown Bank to ask for a municipal loan. They were refused with the admonishment that no town so far from the Ohio River could ever amount to anything. Downstream from Shawneetown was Cairo, a town convinced that its location, where the Ohio met the Mississippi, would make it the future capital of the United States. Cairo did have magnificent geographic advantages all of which were squandered in large part by poor civic leadership. The most historically interesting Illinois boundary is its northern one, which today rest at the 42 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude. While the northern border is distinct as the only major Illinois border that is not at least in part formed by water, its position was shaped by maritime considerations. How and why that happened is a tangled tale. It starts with Thomas Jefferson who, in 1784, proposed a series of boundaries and possible state names for the federal lands north and west of the Ohio River. What is now Illinois, on Jefferson s map, were three distinct states. Polypotamia was the name he gave the southern portion between the Mississippi, Ohio, and Wabash Rivers. The central portion, which extended to roughly what is now Interstate 80, was christened Illinoia. The northern most section embraced a large share of the southern and western shore of Lake Michigan and would have extended far enough north to include the future cites of Kenosha, Racine, and Milwaukee along with Chicago. To this potential commonwealth Jefferson gave the unhappy name Assenisipia. Alas, Jefferson s plan was not adopted by Congress. Three years later, when Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, Illinois was projected to extend north only to the southern tip of Lake Michigan, leaving the trading post at Chicago to Wisconsin. This design was frustrated almost solely through the efforts of Nathaniel Pope who was the Illinois territorial delegate in 1818 when the issue of statehood came before the Congress. As territorial

3 delegate he had a right to speak in Congress but not to vote. He seems to have been a persuasive orator because he convinced Congress to accept Illinois as a state even though it was twenty thousand people short of the population requirement for statehood. Just as important, he successfully argued that the state s northern border be moved north. His rationale for this is not entirely clear because there is no transcript of Congressional debates from this time. The abstract in the official Annals of Congress credits Pope with stating that adjusting the border north would afford additional security to the perpetuity of the Union. Maritime history provides the best explanation of how adjusting Illinois s border north would aid the perpetuity of the Union. In 1818, the bulk of the Illinois population was in the southern portion of the state they had come to Illinois from Dixie following the Ohio, Tennessee, or Cumberland Rivers. Their trade and commerce were largely down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The northern portion of the state was sparsely inhabited but linked to the fur trade of the Great Lakes. Plans for a canal to link the Illinois River with the lakes had influenced the federal government when they negotiated a treaty with the Potawatomi Indians in That agreement created the Indian Boundary a ten-mile-wide corridor on either side of the Chicago Portage that cleared Indian land title for a potential canal right-of-way. Nathaniel Pope understood that building a canal through that area would be easier to finance and construct if the territory between the Chicago River and the Illinois River were all in a single state. In 1836 Illinois did approve funding for such a project, the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Nathan Pope Illinois Territory Delegate, 1818 That canal tied the northern portion of the state commercially to the northeast and made it an outlet for that region s burgeoning population. As Pope foresaw, this created a state with bifurcated commercial and cultural ties. The southern half would be aligned with the states of the South and the Northern portion with the Atlantic ports of the northeast. Since its earliest days, the nation had been beset by sectional tensions between North and South. This was not simply controversy over slavery, which was only beginning to be a source of discord, but more fundamentally, the regions quarreled over the role of the federal government in the economy. As the popular play Hamilton makes clear, the commercial northeast wanted an active government that would aid economic development through road and harbor construction. The agricultural South wanted to keep political power on the local level with a weak federal government. The result of Pope s successful move of the Illinois boarder was a state that developed reflecting both regional perspectives. In 1861, when sectional tensions boiled-over into Civil War, it was the Illinoisans Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant that ensured the perpetuity of the Union. However, down through the decades, Pope s action has caused endless mischief for Illinois internal politics with the conflicts between the Chicago metro area and downstate. Today Illinois remains two diverse regions joined unhappily at the hip.

4 Third Friday Presents West by Southwest to Stickney: Draining the Central Area...and Exorcising Clout Join us for Third Friday Open House on April 20 when author Richard Lanyon discusses the story of draining the South and West Sides of Chicago and western suburbs by eliminating the stagnant, encrusted cesspool that was Bubbly Creek and of clearing the politics of out of the South Side sewer district to deliver taxpayers efficient, professional, and reliable service. West by Southwest to Stickney is the third in a four-book series by Lanyon, a retired executive director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase. The Open House is from 7 to 10 p.m on Friday, April 20. Presentation begins at 7:30 p.m. The museum is located at 1200 W. 35th, inside the Bridgeport Art Center. Parking is free on the north side of the building. Museum entrance is free on Third Fridays, but the presentation is $5 for members and $10 for non-members at the door. The Operations Board of CMM will continue supporting Third Friday Open House with a light food and beverage table. the Curator s Corner by Don Glasell Eastland Porthole Key to Young Passenger s Escape When you re in the museum, look at the porthole in the Eastland exhibit and think about this story. An employee at Western Electric, Agnes Latowski (Summitt) was aboard the Eastland in the summer of 1915 along with her older brother, Walter, and her older sister, Nellie. The three Latowskis were in the lounge area below deck. Agnes had gone into the women s lounge area with a purse handed to her by her sister Nellie. When the Eastland capsized, Agnes managed to get to a porthole on the starboard side. After scrambling out of the 12-inchround porthole, she then slid off the side of the ship into the water. Here she grabbed ahold of a life preserver that someone had thrown to her. Whereas Agnes was able to make it to safety and to survive the Eastland Disaster, her sister Nellie and her brother Walter, did not. Walter appeared to have been bruised or crushed, possibly by a piano that was in the lounge area.

5 Third Coast Percussion to Present Paddle to the Sea The classic children s book and Academy Award-nominated film, Paddle to the Sea, is the focus of a new project and album from Grammy-winning Chicago quartet, Third Coast Percussion, that looks at our relationship to the bodies of water that connect our lives. Third Coast Percussion has composed a new score to be performed live with the film, at Thalia Hall on Sunday, May 13 at 7:30 p.m. The award-winning book tells the story of a Native Canadian boy who carves a wooden figure called Paddle-to-the-Sea and sets him on a journey through all five Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, and finally to the Atlantic Ocean. Paddle to the Sea underscores the geographic, economic, and cultural connections in our shared waterways, and it also asks us to consider the human impact on the waters that help us transport our goods, provide our electrical power, bathe ourselves, cook our food, and quench our thirst. The performance includes music collaboratively composed by the four members of Third Coast Percussion as an updated sound track for the film, as well as the other water-themed works that provided inspiration to the quartet as they composed this music. For tickets, click here: campaign=bt3.sos&utm_source=thalia+tickets&utm_medium=&s3=a7aaa7v City Announces New Restaurant Complex on Chicago Riverfront A new restaurant complex is coming to the Chicago riverfront from Lettuce Entertain You and RPM restaurants. Calling the riverfront the next recreational frontier, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the major redevelopment project on the river s north bank at Clark Street. Read more here:

6 Riverline Mega-development Divides into Separate Residential Projects Less than two years after breaking ground on one of Chicago s most ambitious residential developments, Riverline s owners have split the $2 billion plan into two projects along the Chicago River. Read more here: SOUTH BRAN CH CHICAGO RIVER ASHLAND AVENUE BUBBLY CREEK 55 BRIDGEPORT PARKING LOT NORTH ENTRANCE CHICAGO MARITIME MUSEUM RACINE AVENUE HALSTED AVENUE Making your way to the Chicago Maritime Museum! 35TH STREET NOT TO SCALE

7 MARITIME EVENT CALENDAR Check out local maritime events at the Chicago Maritime Museum website calendar page: Submit maritime events in the Chicagoland area to Mary Ann O Rourke at maorourke@ameritech.net. We hope you ve enjoyed our monthly e-newsletter, On the Move. If you have a Chicago maritime story idea please forward it to maorourke@ameritech.net.