Hennepin Canal Parkway: History Through the Miles, by Barton Jennings, 2020, 404 pages.
One day I was searching though the American Canal Society archives looking for book or two about the history of the Illinois and Mississippi Canal, otherwise known as the Hennepin, and, to my surprise, I found very little. So I went looking for a book that would fill that need.
The 75-mile-long Hennepin was an extension of the older Illinois and Michigan, offering a route between the western end of the I&M and the Mississippi River at Rock Island. Although the canal had been proposed for decades, construction didn’t begin until 1892 and it wasn’t completed until 1907. By the time the route was ready, the larger Illinois Waterway and Chicago Sanitary Canals had been built, making the smaller Hennepin redundant. However, it remained in operation until 1951. With this late closing date, the canal remains very intact and it is now part of the Hennepin Parkway State Park.
The Hennepin was a canal of firsts. It was the first canal in America to be built completely with Portland Cement instead of cut stone locks. It was a test bed for heavy machinery that was just coming into its own such as the steam shovel and cable way. However, the locks were hand operated, and a towing path was built and maintained, but never used to tow a boat. This made the canal a unique mix of the old and new. And we can see how the materials, tools, techniques and machines first used in the construction of the Hennepin would be used on larger projects in the near future. Although Mr. Jennings doesn’t mention it, the Chicago Sanitary, the New York State Barge Canal, and the Soulanges Canal in Quebec, all have tie ins with the work done on this canal. Mr. Jennings does mention the Panama Canal, which greatly benefited from all these projects.
Barton Jennings offers a very readable history and field guide to the canal and the parkway, which includes the main canal and the 29-mile-long feeder. His book offers a mile-by-mile description of what you will see and encounter along the trail, but in a very enjoyable format. The author bios states that Mr. Jennings is a professor of supply chain management and also taught transportation operations. His experience as a teacher certainly shows in his style of writing where he covers the basics for the casual park user, but he also gives those of us who want them the added details that historians love to see.
The book begins with a 50-page history of the canal, beginning in 1834 and working up through the construction in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then he begins his tour narrative at mile 0.00 at the eastern end. It is nice to see that the history lesson continues through each mile, and this makes for very informative reading. In each mile he explains in some detail what you are seeing, what was once there (if a structure has been replaced or modified), and why it is there. For instance, a bridge is described as a “Warren pony truss span with two 21-foot I-beam approach spans,” instead of simply saying a bridge, which makes the bridge geek in me very happy. To be sure, for those who don’t give a hoot about the history or infrastructure, this additional information will be passed over, while those who want to know are not left with unanswered questions.
I became interested in the Hennepin as I was researching the NYS Barge Canal construction machinery series, as the Hennepin and the Chicago Sanitary were both test beds of innovation for a lot of the machinery that was used on the New York Barge Canal. So I was delighted to see Mr. Jennings include sections such as, “The Battle of Cecil’s Slough,” where the canal had to be cut through the soft ground at mile 19. In order to deal with the muck, Lidgerwood cableways were constructed with two towers, one on each bank and a cable suspended between them. From this cable, a bucket would be used to remove the mucky soil, going where other machines could not. Mr. Jennings gives these machines their due to the point of including a short history of the company and showing a drawing of the rig. The book is full of little historical tidbits like this which makes it fun to read, even from a thousand miles away.
The book contains many photographs, drawings and maps. There is no index of the illustrations, but as almost every page has one, I would say that there are well over 200, if not many more. The format is 8.5 by 5.5 inches, and all the illustrations are in black and white. In addition, each photo, map and drawing includes a full citation, and Mr. Jennings offers additional reading sources for those who really want to dig deep into the history of the Hennepin Canal.
Mr. Jennings is to be congratulated for his engaging and very informative book.
