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Morris
Area | Joliet
Area
Water Bridge
2.8 miles west of Dresden is the Aux Sable aqueduct, a 136-foot-long “bridge”
that carries the canal over Aux Sable Creek. Just past the aqueduct is
I&M Canal Lock No. 8 and one of the I&M Canal’s two remaining
locktenders’
houses (the other is at Channahon).
Building the canal
Matthew Neary, an Irish immigrant, was the contractor who built the section
of the I&M Canal around Aux Sable. His workers, also mostly
Irish, earned a dollar a day and lived in shantytowns – hastily built
towns of crude wooden shacks– in the Aux Sable area. Some planted
gardens to grow their own food, which they may have sold or bartered to
their co-workers. Many canal workers were paid in scrip that was redeemable
for canal land instead of cash, and a number of them settled in Aux Sable
Township after the canal was finished.
