Spring 2004

Miles of Tiles

In a world of wetlands, farmers drained the lands to feed themselves. Today, conservationists bring back the water and the wildlife — and unearth a buried legacy.

By Alison Carney Brown

"The secret to farming is dung and drainage."

This credo, coined in the 19th century by New York state farmer and drainage innovator John Johnston, reflects the importance of a well-drained field to agriculture. But perhaps nowhere was drainage more important than in the wide-open Chicago Wilderness of that century, where the prairie's rich soils, interspersed regularly with marshes and ponds, beckoned legions of farmers. Before the European wave of settlement, more than eight million acres of wetlands, home to thousands of unique plants and animals, covered nearly a quarter of Illinois. But over the course of a century, men dramatically transformed the landscape, reducing its wetlands to just more than one million acres with the help of a simple length of pipe — the drain tile.

In the eastern United States during the 1800s, farmers experimented with various methods of draining their valuable wet acreage. They hollowed out tree trunks to make wooden tiles and fashioned drains by laying stones on top of each other. Some simply dug grooves in the land. But by the mid-1800s, John Johnston had adopted a simple model for clay drain tiles so effective that he was dubbed the "father of tile drainage in the United States."

In the beginning, most farmers made their own burnt-red ceramic tiles by hand. The "shinbone" style illustrates the farmers' practical and creative nature: wet clay bent over the farmer's shinbone formed a u-shaped tunnel that was dried and propped over a flat piece of clay, allowing water to drain through. Homemade drain tiles, honed by the experimentation in the east, reached prominence in the Chicago region by the end of the 1870s, where most farmers had settled on a simple rounded cylinder design. As demand grew, brick manufacturers began mass-producing affordable tiles. Agriculture improvement societies and county fairs fanned the advance of drainage technology and encouraged the tiles' widespread use.

The drain tile industry marketed directly to farmers, using familiar promotional tools and educational materials to get the message out. Government agencies also published how-to booklets. Photo by John Weinstein.

The size of the farmer's field determined the size of drain tiles used. The biggest, the "main tiles," ranged from 6 to 24 inches in diameter and were typically about a foot long. The farmer dug networks of deep trenches, usually by spade, laid the tiles in, and buried them. As water percolated down through the soil, it entered the drain tiles through the uncemented tile joints. The action of water flowing through the tiles pulled more water into the system, which ultimately fed into drainage ditches, streams, and rivers.

Drain tiles made plowing paths straighter and more efficient. Rather than having to cross a small stream with a horse and a plow, a farmer could put the stream underground, explains Ed Collins, natural resource manager for the McHenry County Conservation District and an expert on drain tiles.

The largest tile that Collins has unearthed was 36 inches in diameter. "It was used to bury a head-water stream as wide as a kitchen table," he recalls. "There were literally tens of thousands of these streams in Illinois." According to Collins, the perfectly square fields that we see throughout the Midwest today are the work of three or four generations. "For a farmer's family, draining the land meant they would have money to buy a washing machine, a truck that works, or a college education for a child."

While drainage began mostly as a neighborhood undertaking, two Illinois laws in 1878 vastly enlarged the scale of land conversion. The Drainage District Act and the Levee Act allowed farmers to join into districts to embark on larger drainage projects and tax all who benefited from them. At the program's peak, from 1900 to 1929, hundreds of drainage districts worked hand in hand with hundreds of tile manufacturers. By 1935, farmers had laid enough drain tiles in Illinois to circle the world six times. "The Golden Gate Bridge," Collins asserts, "pales in comparison to the draining of the mid-continental wetlands."

As farms prospered in the drained wetlands, species like the great egret declined. These wetland-dependent animals are now repopulating the reclaimed areas. Photo by Lynn M. Stone.

Today, in places where land-use has shifted away from agriculture, the drain-tile culture has also shifted. A growing number of communities and counties tax themselves to protect and restore the open space that was once farmed. They seek to return water to the land in order to welcome back nature, recreating the wetlands that once harbored egrets, black-crowned night-herons, snakes, crayfish, and frogs; and the wet prairies that once favored northern harriers and short-eared owls.

These communities also seek to reduce flooding and riverbank erosion, improve water quality in rivers and streams, and recharge aquifers — all services restored with the return of healthy wetlands. "Drain tiles generally move water off-site as fast as possible into surface drainage ways," explains Jean Sellar, a biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "This causes rivers and streams to rise. By disabling tile systems, more water is stored on-site where it falls."

Altering a drain tile system begins with determining not only where the tiles are, but how much water is flowing through the system, where the system sits in the watershed, the elevation changes of the site, and how land is used on neighboring sites, says Tom Huddleston, owner of Huddleston McBride Land Drainage Company. Huddleston manages 200 projects a year, relying on three main methods to modify or disable a drainage system.

One method, called "trenching," requires heavy equipment to remove and crush the tiles. Although contractors carefully remove the topsoil and place it back to preserve the seed bank, the method can be disruptive. Still, says Huddleston, in many places, such as the Geneva Park District's Peck Farm in Kane County, trenching can be the best way to assure a complete return to a site's original hydrology.

A less invasive alternative is to plug the drain tiles. At the 42-acre Jelkes Creek Wetland in Kane County, owned by the Village of Sleepy Hollow, Huddleston blocked drain tiles with a rubber plug every 100 to 200 feet, backing up the water. He placed plugs at gradient-determined intervals to deter groundwater from finding its way back into the tiles.

A third method is to install valves at tile joints. Technicians can then adjust the valves to determine how much water flows through the tiles. Huddleston, working with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County and the Army Corps, valved the drain tiles at the 375-acre Bartel Grassland in Matteson. Valves can rehydrate a site while allowing floodwaters to pass through from neighboring sites.

In other places, nature has done some of the work. Some tiles at the Orland Tract in Orland Park have collapsed over time, leaving eroded grassy holes, some as big as a car. Huddleston's company will eventually regrade these to create gentle slopes.

In restorations across Chicago Wilderness, nature can begin its reclamation in earnest once the right water conditions return, a process that can take two to three years after a tile has been disabled. Native plants and animals usually aren't far behind. At these restored sites, the farmers may have gone, but the land will feed many mouths — the crawling, hopping, and flying kind — again.

Left, tiles are being excavated near Flint Creek in Barrington with heavy digging equipment. Photo by Donna Lee. Right, wet prairies are being restored once tiles are disabled. Photo by Mike MacDonald/www.ChicagoNature.com.