Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area - History

History

While the flat, alluvial soil of this riparian bottomland was intensely fertile, the lack of adequate drainage made the land of the Goose Lake country unsuitable for subdivision for agriculture. A different fate awaited much of it.

The poorly-drained sediment under and adjacent to Goose Lake was rich in clay. Starting as early as the 1820s, the sticky clay was extensively dug by settlers. Some of them were trained potters; they fired the clay in kilns to create pieces of earthenware for frontier farm and household needs. The potters' settlement was called Jugtown, and the road to the park's visitor center is called Jugtown Road to this day. A few pieces of Jugtown earthenware have been saved by collectors, and some of the larger claypits can be seen today. Frontiersmen also dug ditches through the clay to partly drain the wet prairie for pastureland. Soil too damp for crops could be used for cattle.

Local drainage activity peaked in 1890, when local farmers formed a drainage district and cooperated to drain Goose Lake. The area's defining geographical feature disappeared and was replaced by damp farmland and wet pastureland. The drainage was a partial failure; if it had been a success, the remaining patches of prairie would have disappeared under the plow. Today, the park's Marsh Loop Trail passes over part of the bed of the vanished lake.

Underneath the clay were thin veins of coal, dug from the beginning by the farmers and potters for local use. In the second half of the 1800s, regional coal mining increased to supply fuel to the growing city of Chicago. The main line of the Santa Fe Railroad was built adjacent to the prairie land, and the mines built spur tracks into the coal field to haul the coal to customers. Industrial strip mining, with motorized shovels, began in 1928. The miners left piles of tailings in the southern section of the remaining prairie, further altering the landscape.

The area was further altered after World War II with the construction of two great electrical generating plants, the coal-burning Collins Station and the nuclear-powered Dresden Nuclear Power Plant (1960). The Collins plant was constructed in conjunction with an adjacent 2,000-acre (810 ha) artificial pond, Heidecke Lake, dug to serve as a cooling pond for the generating plant. Heidecke Lake today serves as much of the northern boundary of Goose Lake Prairie. Ironically, the hand of man had destroyed one lake in the Illinois River bottomland, Goose Lake, and then created another, Heidecke Lake.