The East Race
Near South Bend, Indiana
Running alongside the Saint Joseph River through downtown South Bend is a narrow channel called the East Race. In eighteen forty-three, it was dug as an industrial millrace: a canal diverting water from the river to power factories and mills. For nearly a century it did exactly that, driving turbines, running equipment, making things.
Water rights to the East Race were claimed in eighteen thirty-one by Alexis Coquillard and Lathrop Taylor, the city's founders, almost at the moment South Bend was being platted. By the early nineteen hundreds, the Oliver Chilled Plow Works ran a hydroelectric plant off the channel, supplying electricity to factory buildings nearby.
Then the factories left or modernized. The hydro plant was demolished in nineteen seventy-three. The canal sat stagnant, then partially filled in.
In nineteen eighty-two, the city of South Bend made an unusual decision: instead of capping the old industrial channel permanently, engineers re-excavated it and reconfigured the flow to create whitewater. On June twenty-ninth, nineteen eighty-four, the East Race Waterway reopened as what was, at that moment, the first artificial whitewater course in North America.
The current is fast enough for kayaking and rafting. Operators can adjust the flow and configure obstacles. What was built to power lathes and foundries in eighteen forty-three now hosts recreational paddlers a few blocks from the old Studebaker complex.
The same river that made the city possible, that turned the portage route into a trade hub, is still doing something useful downtown.
