Limestone from Lemont and Joliet played a big role in rebuilding Chicago in the years following the Great Chicago Fire.
A drawing of the Chicago Water Works looking east, shows the two major buildings: the engine and boiler room building, right, and the tower, center, both made of limestone from a Lemont quarry.
Initially, Lemont limestone was sold as lining for the Illinois and Michigan Canal that linked Chicago with Joliet on its way to the Illinois River and beyond. Farmers bought the crushed rock, valuing its “sweetening” capacity to reduce their soil’s acidity. Hearing that the flames had reached the city’s Court House, which housed a jail as well as governmental offices, Mayor Roswell Mason ordered inmates released from their cells, “keeping them in custody of possible.“ They ran for their lives.
“A reporter took a look yesterday at the drawings he has made to show the Board where granite can be used, and from a casual glance could not escape the impressions that the architect’s instructions had been broad and comprehensive, for here and there the drawings had been marked in plain characters, ‘Hallowell Granite,’” the Tribune wrote.
People crowd the streets in front of Holy Name Cathedral at State and Superior Streets to greet Cardinal Mundelein on May 11, 1924. The church was built using limestone from a quarry in Lemont.
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