Hennepin Canal, America's First Concrete Waterway

The canal running beside you carries more engineering history than its quiet surface suggests. The Hennepin Canal, completed in nineteen oh seven, was the first canal in the United States built of concrete rather than cut stone. Construction began in eighteen ninety and took about seventeen years, connecting the Illinois River to the Mississippi and shortening the Chicago-to-Rock Island water route by four hundred nineteen miles.

The techniques developed here proved consequential: engineers working on the Hennepin directly influenced the construction methods later applied to the Panama Canal. The Hennepin originally featured nine concrete aqueducts carrying the waterway over rivers and streams. Though the canal never achieved the commercial success its builders hoped for, it was converted to a state parkway in nineteen seventy and is now listed in its entirety on the National Register of Historic Places, preserving a hundred and six miles of trail along the water.