History
The lake was constructed as a source of water for Decatur, especially the local corn refining industry. Corn refiner A.E. Staley led the campaign to persuade Decatur to borrow the $2.0 million necessary for the project. Staley was not being altruistic; the manufacture of corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup, which Staley's successor firm Tate & Lyle, and its local competitor Archer Daniels Midland, carry on to this day, is a water-intensive industrial process. Lake Decatur water is also used in the process of refining corn into ethanol. As of 2007, about 76 percent of Lake Decatur's water was used for commercial and industrial purposes.
As the largest artificial lake in Illinois at the time of construction, with a 30-mile (48 km) shoreline, Lake Decatur quickly became a focus of local recreation. The invention of the gasoline-powered speedboat had made sheltered reservoir waters attractive to many inland Americans.
Read more about this topic: Lake Decatur
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)