Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal

In January 1900, Chicago did something few cities have ever attempted: it reversed a river. For decades the city's sewage had flowed down the Chicago River into Lake Michigan, the same lake that supplied its drinking water, and outbreaks of typhoid and cholera followed. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal solved the problem by cutting through the low divide between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin, sending the river, and the city's waste, west toward the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers instead.

Downstream states objected, and Missouri took Illinois to court, but the canal stayed open and made Chicago a hub of barge traffic linking the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. It also opened a path for invasive species, and since the 2000s electric barriers near Romeoville have tried to keep Asian carp from reaching Lake Michigan. In 1952 the American Society of Civil Engineers named Chicago's sewage system one of the seven wonders of American engineering, and in 1999 it honored the canal as a Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium.

• The Mississippi River
  The great river that drains the American heartland connects to
• The Eastern Continental Divide
  The Appalachian line between Atlantic and Gulf waters crosses
• Chicago
  The third-largest U.S. city, on Lake Michigan located in
• Illinois
  The Prairie State, hinge of the Midwest located in
• Lake Michigan
  The only Great Lake entirely within the United States related