Industrialization and Sewage (continued)

Other industries such as a glucose factory produce 200 tons of dry, organic waste a day, dumped directly into the Illinois River. A strawboard factory in Peoria adds another 27 tons daily (Hays 1980). This does not include the wastes generated and discharged from distilleries, breweries, and other industries along the river.

The river and its banks are “dark with decomposed organic waste,” and material is dredged frequently to facilitate steamboat and barge travel. Analyses of the river below Peoria in 1866 reveal pollution that resembles “conditions in the stockyards branch of the Chicago River” (Thompson 2002).

The summer air in Beardstown in 1889 reeks of “dead fish and decomposing garbage and vegetation” that residents dump on the “towns watery margins” (Thompson 2002). There are no landfills or organized waste collection in Beardstown or other communities, so garbage is burned or disposed of wherever convenient.

These pollutants adversely affected the taste of fish, which caused a decrease in the fishing industry. The fish absorb the decomposing garbage and other pollutants, leaving “a ‘gassy’ or carbolic-acid-like taste to their flesh” (Thompson 2002). This occurs as far downstream as Meredosia.

Scientific water quality analyses by Dr. John H. Long confirm the problems in Peoria and Pekin. During 1886, 1887, 1888, and 1889, Dr. Long takes a total of 700 samples of water from the I & M Canal and the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. He concludes that there is marked improvement in the quality of the Illinois River as it flows toward the Mississippi, and “this is quite independent of changes by sedimentation or dilution,” and the “rate of change is largely dependent on temperature, the winter rate being much slower than the summer rate” (Long 1901).

Dr. Long also discusses the important fishing industry that exists between Peoria and Grafton. Good fishing exists above Peoria, but the river is “temporarily fouled by the ordinary sewage and cattle-shed waste of Peoria and Pekin” (Long 1901) By the time the water reaches downstream at Havana, the river becomes clean for good fishing.

Long (1901) concludes:

It has been shown that in the stretch of the canal and river between Chicago and Peoria, a remarkable destruction of organic matter is constantly taking place, not by sedimentation, as former critics of the work of the Board were anxious to believe, but by organic oxidation...The great mass of organic filth passing Lockport is practically destroyed, or rendered harmless by conversion into stable compounds while the myriads of bacterial cells depending on it for their existence have likewise disappeared. Save for the presence of inorganic remains, the chlorides and the nitrates of oxidation, there is nothing here to distinguish the Illinois from its unpolluted tributaries, which old dissolved, mainly, the organic products of decay or vegetable matter. The condition below Peoria is vastly different from what it is above, and largely because of the pollution from the cattle-sheds at the distilleries.

It is also Long’s opinion that if anything else is to be done to improve water quality in the Illinois River, it must be done south of Peoria, where the primary source of pollution is the cattle-shed and distillery refuses from Peoria and Pekin. He further finds that eliminating the flow from Chicago would result in a diminution in the “harmless nitrates and chlorides only,” so effective as of 1889, Dr. Long finds the sewage from Chicago has little permanent impacts to the Illinois River at Peoria or farther south (Long 1901).

The debate continues, particularly after the reversal of the Chicago River in 1900. In 1902, there is a serious dispute between St. Louis and Chicago, with St. Louis claiming that Chicago is the primary source of filth at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Water quality testing proves otherwise: Professor Palmer, a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois, along with Stephen Forbes, initiates the chemical analysis Illinois River waters. Mr. Palmer’s report indicates that Peoria and Pekin should beheld as equally accountable as Chicago for the pollution of the Illinois River:

It would seem that the wastes introduced into the Illinois River at these points are as considerable in amount and as offensive in character as are those introduced in the sewage of Chicago, and indeed in times of low water the condition of the Illinois River between Peoria and Pekin and below Pekin, was often fully as bad as the condition of the Chicago River in times of its most notorious offensiveness.

This opinion is supported by an observation by a Peoria distillery manager in 1901:

[Slop and excrement] would accumulate along the bank for indefinite periods until high water washed it away, when it would flow down the stream in large islands, one of which was too large to pass between the piers of the Pekin bridge. (McCarthy 1991).