Reflections: When the Fox was 'a dirty, evil smelling waterway’

When I was a youngster, the old-timers used to regale us with stories about how clear and pure the Fox River was when they were young. Like most really good stories, they weren’t true.

The Native People who arrived along the banks of the Fox River some 10,000 years ago were the first to modify the stream. The weirs and other structures they used to harvest the river’s fish gradually filled in, creating or enlarging islands and otherwise changing the valley’s topography.

But it was the settlers who emigrated to the Fox Valley beginning in the late 1820s who really modified the river in major ways. Those pioneer farms began the erosion of the Fox Valley’s topsoil, and efforts to drain wetlands to create more cropland had a major impact on the river’s water levels.

The biggest change on the river, however, was the numerous dams that began dotting the stream from its mouth at the Illinois River at Ottawa north all the way above the Wisconsin state line. The Fox Valley’s millwrights built low dams to power sawmills and gristmills to serve the valley’s growing population. The dams, built without floodgates that would have maintained an undertow to scour the river bottom, created still ponds that allowed the silt eroded from all those farms into the stream to gradually settle out.

That had the effect of stopping fish from ascending the river to spawn, as well as ruining some prime spawning areas by covering them with silt. The dams, in effect, created short stretches of river habitat that had a serious impact on the river’s vertebrate and invertebrate populations.

From the mid-19th century, the Fox River had become an economic engine for the entire valley. First, the mills provided economic boosts for their surrounding communities. Then, after the Ottawa, Oswego and Fox River Valley Railroad was built, linking Ottawa at the river’s mouth with towns as far north as Geneva, the river’s water, in the form of ice, could be marketed. Large ice harvesting operations were begun above every dam on the river. The ice warehoused during the winter harvests was shipped for use in homes to keep food fresh in ice boxes and commercially to cool the beef and pork being shipped from Chicago in newly invented railroad refrigerator cars.

Fish were commercially harvested from the river, as were the freshwater mussels and clams that covered the river bed. Clam shells were sent to button factories – one was located in Yorkville for a few years – where special drills punched out mother-of-pearl button blanks in various sizes that were turned into finished buttons by further processing. Among the millions of clams harvested, an occasional pearl of great price was discovered.

As industrialization of the Fox Valley increased, the river came under new, additional stresses. Municipal sewer systems, admirable from a public health standpoint, piped sewage directly into the river. The industries on the river did the same, sending their waste downstream – out of sight out of mind, the policy seemed to be.

Some of that industrial waste was even more harmful to humans, as well as the fish and other animals who lived in the river, than the growing volume of human waste flowing into the stream.

By the 1880s, it was realized that some of the river’s uses were incompatible with its health. In November 1882, the Kendall County Record reported from Yorkville: “Notice has been served on the owners of all dams on Fox river asking them to put in fishways, and the owners refuse. The State Fish Commissioners will begin suits in the courts, which the mill men will contest to test the constitutionality of the law. The dam owners have formed a league and employed Hopkins & Aldrich as their attorneys.”

The dam owners did indeed protest and fought the law in the courts, but consistently lost, and fishways were gradually installed in all the dams, though in practice they proved of little value.

But even if fishways were provided, the polluted character of the river militated against the Fox’s wildlife. On Sept. 18, 1890, the Record noted: “The fish of Fox and other small rivers must soon be exterminated if factories and cities continue to use the streams for sewers. The glucose factories up the river are poisoning the fish by wholesale, and the fish in Vermillion river at Streator are killed by the water pumped from coal mines and refuse from paper mills.”

Conditions only worsened with the dawn of the 20th century. The Feb. 9, 1916, Record reported: “The [Illinois Rivers and Lakes] commission has surveyed the Fox river and discovered it to be ‘a dirty, evil smelling waterway’ from which the fish have been killed off. The reason is that its flow is not sufficient in the summer months to purify the sewage dumped in it.”

More laws were passed, but enforcement was either lax or nonexistent. And so, in the late 1960s Kendall County resident Jim Phillips was taking a walk and found dead ducks in a small stream near his house and decided to do something. He assumed the alter ego of “The Fox” and, using a combination of audacity and humor, began plaguing polluters in a series of guerrilla raids designed to shine the harsh light of publicity and ridicule on them. And his efforts, small at first, snowballed. Pollution became big news. Sympathetic officials at the national, state, and local levels listened and, amazingly, acted, creating the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as similar state and local agencies.

The result? Today, the Fox, “a dirty, evil smelling waterway” a century ago is now a destination for anglers, canoeists, kayakers, bird watchers and others who just like enjoying nature. Game fish and freshwater mussels and clams are again plentiful and the Fox once again is an economic engine for the towns dotting its banks. As we celebrate Earth Day Monday, April 22, and in a time when national environmental policy is cause for great concern, it’s worth thinking about how far we’ve come and why it’s so important we continue to insist on clean water.

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