To reduce water use in an ongoing severe drought, the City of Bloomington has asked residents to conserve water by a goal of 10%.
Water shortages are not unheard of for the city. Even at its start, water was scarce in Bloomington.
“Bloomington was notorious for having one of the more unpalatable and harder municipal water sources in the entire state,” said Bill Kemp, a librarian at the McLean County Museum of History.
Kemp said water is one thing often taken for granted in the modern western world. In North America, people are usually dependent on their local governments for a safe supply of drinking water, which puts a strain on them.
For the first 100 years of Bloomington history, there was not enough of it to go around.
“The problem was good water was just hard to find here, especially when you relied on shallow wells, as the city did for much of its early history,” said Kemp. “So, that was a problem. And then come summertime, you would often have water shortages.”
Safe to say, today’s leaders in Bloomington-Normal find themselves in a similar situation to Normal founder Jesse Fell. Kemp said in the early 1850s, Fell was looking northward at the Mackinaw River as a future source of drinking water.
“…and then the problem really came to a head in the first few months of 1920 when a virulent typhoid epidemic raged through,” Kemp said. “At that time, the largest employer in the community, the Chicago and Alton railroad shops on the west side of Bloomington, some 800 shop men are sickened, and 24 will die of full-blown typhoid.”
Typhoid fever manifests in a high fever, combined with abdominal pain, constipation, headaches and vomiting. The bacterial infection is highly contagious and transmitted primarily through water.
The Chicago and Alton railroad shops did not have enough water, so they used wells in the area. The water was used for locomotive boilers and toilets, causing the contamination amid the workers.
“Well, that was really the straw that broke the camel’s back for a lot of people in the City of Bloomington, including political leaders and business leaders,” he said. “Something clearly had to be done, and then later that year, there is a drought, and the water problem comes to the fore. So, the city, for the first time in its history, takes the issue of municipal water seriously. Studies are undertaken, engineering reports paid for.”
Fell’s original idea of the Mackinaw River was beginning to become a more plausible one. With the creation of the new Association of Commerce in 1927, 14 Bloomington-Normal business and political leaders organized the Bloomington Water Company. It was a private organization headed by E.M. Evans of Bloomington.
The company was backed by Chicago business bankers and an issuance of $1 million in bonds.
“So, $1 million today, adjusted for inflation, would be about $23-and-a-half million or so,” Kemp said. “So, you had this private endeavor to build or construct a reservoir, and then it would be a turnkey project.
“These businessmen who invested in those would make a tidy sum or profit and then hand over the future municipal water supply, that is the water in Lake Bloomington over to the City of Bloomington.”
And, Kemp said, that is exactly what happened.
Construction and dedication
While some residents may think the formation of Lake Bloomington came from a New Deal program from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, because of its creation in the 1920s, it was actually passed in a referendum in 1928 by Bloomington voters.
So, in the summer of 1929, one of the largest logging efforts in McLean County history began.
“Sawyers or loggers from the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin come down, they're hired by a contractor, and they will cut down between 40 and 50,000 trees that were part of the serpentine Money Creek wooded valley as it fed into the Mackinaw River Valley, “ said Kemp. “It was one of the more untamed, wild little pockets of McLean County before it was logged and then put under water for the impoundment after the impoundment of the creek itself.”
As the trees were taken down, the tops and small branches cut away, they were taken to different temporary mills to become fence posts, railroad ties and mining props.
Now, this former wooded valley was flooded and became what is known as Lake Bloomington. Kemp said not only was it formerly home to trees, but also significant indigenous archeological sites.
Clyde Huddleson, former chair of the Illinois State Normal University Department of Agriculture, took notice.
“Some area residents were smart enough or wise enough to dig up some of the valley’s wildflowers and transplant them into private gardens,” he said. “So, one imagines that a little bit of Money Creek Valley survives here and there in the area.”
Kemp said a Bloomington parks custodian headed an effort to replant 75 trees from the valley. He planted the hackberry, burr pine and white oak trees in Miller Park.
When the lake is finally formed and Money Creek was dammed, the water backed up for over a year before making its way to the city reservoir on Division Street. The first water in Bloomington from the lake was consumed in a ceremony on March 22, 1930.
“The formal dedication, though, wasn’t done until later that summer, timed with the centennial of McLean County, that would be the summer of 1930,” said Kemp.
Evans, who headed the Bloomington Water Company, had this to say at the ceremony, according to Kemp:
“The city has experienced 100 years of hard water, hard work and sometimes hard times. Here’s hoping the next 100 years or so will be softer.”
But the city realized by the 1960s that Lake Bloomington was not going to be sufficient as the community’s sole water source.
“So, a second reservoir was constructed and finished in the early 1970s, we know that today as Evergreen Lake, and it is what’s created through the impoundment of Six Mile Creek…not Mackinaw River, as a lot of folks believe,” said Kemp.
McHistory is a co-production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History.
