Drainage tile, anyone?

You never know when history is going to happen to you. I went outside the other morning and started clearing up a junk corner my wife and I had targeted for extinction. One item I picked up was a hollow burnt-orange cylinder with walls about half an inch thick -- a drainage tile.

It's very easy not to know what a huge role this piece of ceramic hardware played in the process of turning the often-swampy Midwestern prairie into productive farms connected by actual roads. Not only did it require the technology of creating standardized tile (these days I think they use continuous rolls of corrugated flexible black plastic), but the laws and organization necessary to create drainage districts, because the process won't work unless all the neighbors agree on it.

Tile was just as essential, but less charismatic or conspicuous than barbed wire, because once the fields are drained there's nothing to see. But eastern Illinois, western Indiana, and northwestern Ohio (just to name the parts I'm personally familiar with) would look entirely different if our ancestors and relatives hadn't participated in this process.

This process was not without controversy, then or now. A diverse prairie ecosystem was destroyed and replaced by what are now monocultures of corn and soybeans, dependent on annual doses of oil and chemicals to produce high yields. (In some places those once universally despised swamps are being re-created.)

Law professor James E. Herget wrote a thorough legal account in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society back in 1978; Englishman Hugh Prince's 1997 book Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes, at least part of which is available on a German offshoot of GoogleBooks, is more wide-ranging and even-handed.

How much have people used drainage district records in genealogy? Well, it's not unheard of. The Illinois State Archives holds some such records, and some relevant court records have been abstracted on US GenWeb for Stoddard County, Missouri. I'd love to hear more if anyone has gone beyond staring at an old piece of clay tile.



James E. Herget, "Taming the Environment: The Drainage District in Illinois," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society vol. 71, no. 2 (May 1978):107-118; digital image, Northern Illinois University Libraries Illinois Historical Digitization Project, "Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society," [1950-2006] (http://dig.lib.niu.edu/ISHS/ : accessed 4 June 2012).

Hugh Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Harold Henderson, "Drainage tile, anyone?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

JISHS resources, an idiosyncratic index #1

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

Spring 1950, volume 43(1)

Morgan County, 1876

Illinois State Fair, 1853 (Sangamon County)

Summer 1950, volume 43(2)

Warren County, 1800s

Fort Massac, 1750s-1760s

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society!

The Internet Scout Project brings the welcome news that more than half a century of Illinois' quarterly historical journal (1950-2006) has been digitized and is browsable by issue. This may not be the ideal situation, but it's way better than having boxes full of the magazine around the house (as I did for years) and having to browse every issue manually, provided you could locate it.

There are many wonderful microhistorical sources in this archive. One of my favorites is in the Autumn 1982 issue, "Eight Weeks on a St. Clair County Farm in 1851: Letters by a Young German," but the link now has mysteriously quit working for me. Another goodie is in the winter issue of that year, when Edward R. Kantowicz wrote at length on the French Canadian settlements in Kankakee County.

Although this site has no index of its own, it can be searched via Google, using first site:http://dig.lib.niu.edu/ISHS/ as the search term, and then at the bottom of the resulting search page, clicking on "search within results" and inserting what you actually want to find.