Peru, Illinois: Where the Canal Met the River

You are passing through the Illinois Valley, and the town of Peru sitting on the south bank of the Illinois River played a quiet but decisive role in knitting the young American nation together.

In the eighteen thirties, a question consumed Illinois politicians and merchants: how do you connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River? The answer was the Illinois and Michigan Canal, a ninety-six-mile channel dug almost entirely by Irish immigrant laborers for wages of thirty cents a day plus a daily jigger of whiskey. Construction began in eighteen thirty-six, was halted by the Panic of eighteen thirty-seven, and finally finished in eighteen forty-eight.

When it opened, the canal changed everything. Travelers from New York could take the Erie Canal to Buffalo, steam across the Great Lakes to Chicago, then board a canal boat and float southwest to LaSalle and Peru, where they transferred to river steamboats bound for Saint Louis and New Orleans. For the first time in American history, the Atlantic Ocean was connected to the Gulf of Mexico by an all-water route through the interior. Freight costs collapsed. Chicago exploded.

Peru sat at the western terminus where the canal waters emptied into the Illinois River. Coal, grain, and lumber moved east; manufactured goods and immigrants moved west. Two railroads reached the valley in the eighteen fifties and made the canal obsolete almost immediately, but by then the damage, or rather the transformation, was done. The Illinois Valley had been stamped permanently as an industrial corridor.

Peru was platted in eighteen thirty-four, organized as a borough in eighteen thirty-eight, and grew on the strength of canal commerce, zinc smelting, and later a Westclox clock factory that would have baffled every boatman who ever poled a load of grain through this town. The canal towpath still exists nearby as hiking trail, and on quiet mornings you can walk the same earthen berm that mules once treaded, hauling the commerce of a continent.