Lockport History
By Michael P. Conzen

If 1848 was a key turning point for Chicago, it was nothing less than the defining moment for Lockport. The year 1848 bequeathed Lockport its permanent raison d'etre-to be master of the 100-mile waterway between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin. Had the Illinois & Michigan Canal not finally been completed and opened for business then, Lockport would have served no grand purpose. Were it not for the events of 1848, likely as not, corn would still stand today where busy Route 7 charges across the Public Landing, and all the myriad voices that thrilled Lockport down the decades would have been but the whistle of the wind over the tall grass prairie.

To be sure, Lockport was conceived back in 1836, when the Canal Commissioners decided to headquarter the canal operations away from Chicago. This wise move led surveyors to stake out a town plat where Lockport now stands, fixed by the necessity for locks west of Chicago. The location seemed ideal: accessible to the canal as a whole but not too distant from the expected metropolis, set in fertile surroundings, and charged with potential waterpower to attract industry. But the canal took years to build slowed by a chronic shortage of funds. Few buildings graced this sorry plot--until 1848.

With the canal open, Lockport entered upon a golden age, regulating the commerce and hustle of the entire canal, while charming its waters to grind corn into meal and slop rags into paper. The fortunes conjured up by the canal favored mostly other places--grotesquely so Chicago, but also neighboring rival Joliet--and Lockport soon acquiesced in its small-town destiny. But this destiny created something precious, a town with a distinct character shaped by the I&M Canal. The relics of this symbiosis (the Canal headquarters building, the Gaylord and Norton buildings, and the Public Landing, for example) speak loudly today of the great events around 1848 which energized a whole region. And, intriguingly, Lockport's townscape today lets us get much closer to those momentous times a century and a half ago than either central Chicago or Joliet can ever do.