JOLIET, Ill. (AP) - Wayne Barnett is as excited as a kid in a candy store.
Except the candy in this store consists of rusting iron spikes and cable, 60-foot-long wooden booms, a five-ton bullwheel and two submerged 150-year-old barges.
It’s all part of what the Joliet resident believes to be a staging area used to unload and offload goods from barges on the Illinois & Michigan Canal just upstream from Lock 5.
“I think this is the most significant site on the entire I&M Canal,” Barnett said. “There is no other place that exists like this.”
To the casual eye, the riverside area along U.S. 6 east of Brandon Road looks like little more than abandoned maritime scrapyard. Rusting iron bolts, plates and cables lie half-submerged in muck and mud, interwoven with carpet of weeds and litter.
On the shoreline, a riveted-metal barge sits half-sunk in the mud, providing access to a couple of wooden boat docks. In the center of the docks, covered over with a few canoes, moss and some garbage, two wooden canal boats lie submerged.
“Who would know so much history resides here?” Barnett said while showing the site Thursday.
An avid boater, Barnett has stored his 40-foot sailboat in a marina near the site for the past six winters. Each year the former telecommunications engineer would look at the pieces of wood and iron littering the site and try to figure out what they were used for.
He got some answers from Jim Riggs, who operates a marina at the site, which he leases from the Illinois Department of Conservation.
Riggs already had pulled part of a derrick crane out of the water at the site. And it was Riggs who pointed out the two intact canal boats under the docks.
He and others believe these are the only intact wooden barges still in existence from the I&M Canal era. “They would stack them with wood and take them back and forth from Chicago.”
Last month, Barnett unveiled their findings at a presentation at the Joliet Area Historical Museum. It was the first step in what he hopes will lead to the development of the site into a park and historical center.
Barnett and a group of volunteers have begun collecting artifacts from the site after videotaping their original locations and removal. The boom and mast of the derrick crane now rest in a Rockdale storage yard. He plans on retrieving other parts of the crane next.
“We have all the major parts: the boom, the mast, the bullwheel and the base plate,” Barnett said. “And there’s tons of cable and more exciting stuff buried there.”
Barnett said his next steps will focus on collecting information on the site and setting up a meeting with experts and organizations.
“This thing could not exist for 150 years without someone knowing about it,” Barnett said. “Someone out there has a grandfather, a scrapbook or whatever, something that will tell us more about this site.”
A documentary on the findings at the site will be telecast at 9 a.m., noon and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday on Joliet Community Television Channel 6.
Anyone with information on the site can contact Barnett at IMcanalinformation@yahoo.com.
KNOW MORE
Wayne Barnett hopes his findings will spur development of five projects at the discovery site on the Illinois & Michigan Canal:
. Restoration of the 60- by 125-foot landing platform. Most of the wooden ties that made up the platform have rotted away, but the 36- to 48-inch vertical bolts that held it together are still in place. An 8-foot wide steel walkway with narrow gauge rails, which Barnett believes was used for a cargo trolley, also remains on-site.
. Restoration of a 60-foot derrick crane that Barnett already has retrieved from the site. Metal components to the crane are still there, half-submerged in mud, including an 8-foot bullwheel that allowed the crane to spin, a base plate and a well casing that may have fed water into the crane’s steam engine. Thick strands of cable also are strewn about the site.
. Development of a wooded area near Lock 5, which lies west of the site, into a park and visitors’ center. A walkway would link the two sites.
. Salvage of two canal-era wooden barges submerged offshore. Both boats are intact and “totally salvageable,” according to Jim Riggs. The remains of half of a third barge lie half-submerged in water just west of the site.
. Restoration of a riveted metal deep water barge that rests on the bottom of the canal at the docking site. While not of I&M Canal vintage, it represents a vessel used on the deep waterway canal that replaced it, Barnett said.
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Source: The (Joliet) Herald-News, https://bit.ly/1m09qH4
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