Flashback: In the battle against cholera, a creative city engineer raised streets, tunneled into the lake and reversed the river
As a tidal wave of cholera rolled across Asia, Africa and Europe, the Tribune reported on Dec. 14, 1853, that the dreaded disease had reached the East Coast. Its victims were immigrants who died barely 48 hours after debarking in New York.
“Should we not take timely warning by such a pregnant omen?” the Tribune asked. “Step by step, and week by week the time approaches when the scourge shall visit us. Are we prepared for it?”
Sadly, Chicago was no better prepared than any other city in the pandemic’s path. More than 1,400 died when cholera showed up here the following year. Many succumbed within a day of developing the telltale symptoms of uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting.
But that public health disaster inspired a decadeslong effort to free the city from the grips of disease every bit as laudable as today’s campaign against COVID-19. In fact, Chicago’s dogged persistence, despite repeated failures of promising remedies, would end up transforming its water and sewage management.
“In 1849, 1850, and 1854, the outbreaks of Asiatic cholera were so dreadful as to lead to searching inquires for means of its future prevention, and of course the condition of the city with regard to drainage received a large share of attention,” Ellis Chesbrough, an engineer who took on Chicago’s sewage management, wrote in an 1877 professional paper.
What caused cholera and how it was transmitted were then unknown. But the herald of its arrival was unmistakable: a putrid odor akin to the smell of rotting food.
The stench led some physicians to conclude that, like COVID-19, cholera was an airborne contagion. They theorized the disease emanated from a miasma, a cloud of “bad air” that, raining down, infected victims.
Yet the theory failed to predict the appearance of the disease, as the Tribune reported after cholera several times returned to the city.
“Chicago should be the healthiest city on the continent,” the Tribune noted. “She has no natural miasmas.”
Fortunately a British doctor took a different approach, collecting and examining data before offering a theory. During the pandemic of 1854, Dr. John Snow plotted the addresses of cholera’s victims on a map of Soho, a district of London.
“Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days,” Snow wrote. “As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this (eruption) of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.”
Snow persuaded reluctant officials to remove the pump’s handle, making it impossible for residents to draw drinking water from the well, and the cholera outbreak in Soho ended.
An associate of Snow’s found that a woman whose infant died of cholera discarded into a cesspool the water she had used for washing diarrhea-soiled diapers. Water from the pool leaked into the well, passing along the seeds of cholera.
With the discovery that cholera is waterborne, Snow gave birth to the science of epidemiology. His research confirmed Chicagoans’ suspicions about their water supply; it traveled an infectious loop akin to that of the Broad Street pump.
Chicago didn’t have sewers, so human waste was dumped into the Chicago River. It flowed into Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water, thereby bringing deadly contaminants to every household.
In 1855, Chesbrough was given a mandate to uncouple Chicago’s deadly loop. He intended to begin with a sewer system, the first in the country to be comprehensive, but he faced a major problem. Chicago’s streets were barely above lake level, so sewers dug under them wouldn’t drain into the lake or river.
So Chesbrough laid sewer pipes on the existing streets and covered them with soil. On top of those mounds — some 10 feet higher — new streets were constructed. Then Loop property owners had their buildings jacked up to Chicago’s new ground level.
In city neighborhoods, steps were built from the sidewalk to a new front door on a cottage’s second floor. Backyards that became sunken gardens can still be seen in Pilsen and Back of the Yards.
While the sewer system moved sewage efficiently, it wasn’t an effective defense against waterborne disease. In 1866-67, Chicago suffered another cholera epidemic, and the pollution of its drinking water was unchecked.
“The effect of discharging the contents of the sewers into the river was gradually manifested by increasing its discoloration and offensiveness, and thus affecting the lake so that the water supply to the city was more and more complained of,” Chesbrough recalled.
When Chesbrough proposed drawing drinking water from beyond the reach of the river’s pollution, the Tribune was skeptical. It took a dig at the engineer’s carefully computed cost-benefit analysis of the new project.
“Somebody says ‘run a pipe out into the Lake so far that the water never gets muddy, but is always clear and limpid,’” the paper wrote in 1861. “The Chief Engineer tells us how much this plan would probably cost, how it probably wouldn’t work as far as ordinary modes of laying it down and keeping it open are concerned.”
Nonetheless, the city approved Chesbrough’s plan to dig a 5-foot-wide tunnel through the clay underneath the lake to an intake crib 2 miles off shore. Over three years, the clay was taken away on railroad cars drawn by mules, as masons lined the tunnel with bricks. One construction crew set out from the city’s Water Tower, another from the crib, and when the two met, the city’s movers and shakers took a ride through the tunnel on Dec. 6, 1866.
As the Tribune reported, the tunnel resounded with applause when Mayor J.B. Rice dedicated a commemorative marker. “To one cheer ‘Long live the tunnel,’ the Mayor replied, ‘Long live the people who have built it, and may it be used by many succeeding generations.’”
Indeed it was, though it didn’t stop the cholera that killed 116 Chicagoans in 1873. That setback led Chesbrough to conceive an engineering feat even more audacious than laying sewers on top of streets or tunneling under the lake: reversing the Chicago River.
In 1862, when the water level fell in the Illinois and Michigan Canal that connected the Chicago River with Mississippi River tributaries, river water was pumped into it. The river followed, temporarily reversing its flow.
To make such an effect permanent, Chesbrough had the canal deepened. That isolated Lake Michigan from the Chicago River — breaking the loop of sewage and drinking water that, as Dr. Snow found, propagated cholera.
But downstream towns complained that Chicago’s problem was being dumped on them and sent a declaration to meet with Chesbrough and Chicago’s mayor on Feb. 19, 1879.
A former mayor of Peru said horses wouldn’t drink the water from the canal, the Tribune reported. And a Lemont doctor “thought the poisonous gases floated down the canal were a fruitful source of malaria, typhoid fever, and other diseases of that kind.” The doctor suggested that widening the canal would move the sewage along faster.
More than a decade later, crews set about carving out a new waterway, the much larger Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which opened in January 1900.
Chesbrough didn’t get to see it, having died in 1886, seven years after leaving Chicago in a huff. City officials had taken a pay cut when times were tough. When things got better, others had theirs restored. His wasn’t.
Still, the city belatedly remembered him. In 1933, when plaques were placed on the Water Tower honoring three former water-department engineers, the Tribune summed up Chesbrough’s long struggle to banish cholera with a monumental understatement:
“He had much to do with the early stages of the drainage system and in 1879 became commissioner of public works.”
Editor’s note: Thanks to reader Bob Johnson for suggesting Ellis Chesbrough as a subject.
Have a Flashback idea? Share your suggestions with editors Colleen Kujawa and Marianne Mather at ckujawa@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.
