Mile 106.7: Romeoville (CT)
First visit: Dec. 28, 2022 Public trail? Yes Private land? No Distance walked: 3 miles
Winter is a great time to be out on the trails, any trails, for a variety of reasons. It gets you out of the house, for one thing, and there’s no bugs, although it’s amazing how fast they come out on a warm, sunny day, even in late December. My first time on the Centennial Trail was via the Veterans Memorial Trail on Dec. 28, and there was a decent layer of snow that thawed on the trail while I was hiking; such is the effect of black asphalt on a sunny day.
The Veterans Memorial Trail runs alongside and under I-355, which may not sound promising from a nature standpoint, but it also goes through three forest preserves managed by three counties on its way to the Des Plaines River, which provides a nice contrast and a natural buffer to the interstate. As the sun shone and the snow melted, I was shocked to walk through a cloud of gnats near the icy swamp of Keepataw Preserve, and thought they’d be a welcome surprise to the small birds I saw in the area, which may have been wrens or chickadees – I’m not much of a birder. But they were ignored, at least while I was there, maybe because they were so out of season, or maybe because those birds don’t eat those bugs. I felt sorry that the bugs’ short lives would be a complete waste, then thought they’d probably say the same about me.
This last section of the Centennial Trail runs for three miles between I-355 and Romeo Rd., and during subsequent visits I would come to appreciate the isolation I felt as the only person on the trail that late December day, because it gets busy in warm weather. Especially with bikes. The 12.25-mile Centennial Trail is entirely paved, and irresistible to cyclists. At any given time there’s probably over $1 million in racing bike inventory on the trail. This isn’t great news for the snakes, turtles and various small mammals also using the trail, and in June I saw a large, angry goose get clipped, though it got up and rejoined its family in the river.
Romeoville: the other Stone City
Romeoville is a quarry town, and as recently as 1950 had only 46 homes and 147 people. The Illinois State Capital, unveiled in 1888, is made entirely from Romeoville limestone. So is the Fitzpatrick House, a familiar sight on Independence Blvd., a part of historic Route 66 across from Lewis University. Limestone is literally and metaphorically bedrock material here, as it is in other towns in the area, and both Romeoville and Joliet bear the nickname “Stone City”.
Most of the Midwest as we know it today was formed by vast glaciers that retreated around 14,000 years ago. While these powerful glaciers shaped the land and created the area’s many rivers and lakes, even they were limited in impact by the land itself, which is comprised of a limestone bedrock called dolomite. This limestone was deposited here 300-400 million years ago, when the Midwest was 20 degrees south of the equator and at the bottom of an ocean, and can reach thicknesses of 400 feet. In most places it’s deep enough that we don’t really encounter it, even when digging foundations or wells. But in other areas it is at or near the surface, and we can see it. This is the case at various points along the Des Plaines River, especially south of Lyons, and especially between Lemont and Wilmington, which sits between the Des Plaines and Kankakee Rivers.
Walkers on the Centennial Trail see plenty of limestone, in part because it’s been dug out of the ground and left laying around, in some cases since the mid-1800s. Canal construction, MWRD construction, and former mines and quarries left mounds of limestone debris all over this area that now act as flood barriers and trail foundation. Centennial Hill, which I wrote about in my Willow Springs section, is made entirely of MWRD reservoir debris, most of which is dolomite limestone. And the I&M Canal Passage trail, which runs alongside the Des Plaines in several places, and celebrates limestone’s significance to the area, includes a riverside quarry exhibit in downtown Joliet.
But it’s also possible to see naturally exposed limestone, which I saw while hiking through the Lockport Prairie Preserve and the Des Plaines Dolomite Prairie Land in Wilmington. Both places attracted opportunists who mined and quarried the rock, but for some reason they didn’t get everything. Perhaps some deposits were too close to the river for digging, even during times of little regulation. Or maybe these deposits were simply too hard to excavate and transport profitably. In any case these lands weren’t suitable for agriculture either, so they’ve been reclaimed by us, the tax-paying public, and we hike, bike, snowmobile and hunt on them. And in some places, such as the Rock Run Rookery in Joliet, or Black Partridge Woods here on the Veterans Memorial Trail, we’ve used them to reestablish the wildlife corridor that used to follow the Des Plaines River hundreds of years ago.
Living history in the limestone
These limestone deposits are also rich in fossils, including corals and microscopic animals with unpronounceable names ending in oid, pod or bite, and almost any piece of limestone you happen to pick up potentially has some. They’re more apparent in certain local variations, like the Lemont yellow dolomite, than the hard white limestone scattered around old quarries like the one I trespassed just south of the Chicago Portage site, now an MWRD property.
Though the industry saw its heyday in the mid- to late-19th century, and their remnants reclaimed for public use as far north as Sterling Lake in Van Patten Woods, there are still active quarries and asphalt makers along the southern parts of the river and the San Ship Canal, where the infrastructure facilitates commercial transport via barges, trucks and trains. Just south of I-355, across the river from the Centennial Trail is a large asphalt quarry where noisy earth movers operate just past the busy BNSF tracks, and similar industries arising from the bedrock can be seen and heard elsewhere along the trail and around the preserves in the area.
The Keepataw Preserve, where I encountered the doomed bugs in December, is one of several former quarry sites reclaimed as public land and managed with the intent of restoring its natural habitat. Located at the Will County border, it is next door to Black Partridge Woods, a Cook County Forest Preserve with a similar story of having once been exploited for limestone. Although neither preserve has much in the way of public trails (Black Partridge was dedicated as the second nature preserve in Illinois, in 1965, to protect a spring-fed stream there), they are separated by the Veterans Memorial Trail, from which several well-worn paths lead to different parts of the two properties. On Black Partridge Woods the draw is Goose Lake, a quiet refuge from the droning I-355 bridge. At Keepataw Preserve, a path to a 150-year-old kiln smokestack has been beaten down by people like me, who were lured by glimpses of it from the Veterans trail. It can also be glimpsed from the Centennial Trail. Perhaps they (we) thought it would be visible from the Keepataw overlook trail off Bluff Rd., just a little north, because the Will County website says it is.
Alas, the kiln isn’t visible from there, at least when the surrounding area is in bloom, but a brief quarter-mile trail offers an amazing view of the Des Plaines River Valley (as do many points along Bluff Rd.), where a very tall person would be able to make out the Des Plaines River flowing a half-mile away. Juxtaposed with the 1.3-mile Des Plaines River Valley Bridge on I-355, visitors can appreciate the scale of the valley. It may not be the Columbia River Gorge, but like so many sights down here, it’s a revelation for anyone whose point of reference is limited to the Chicago area.
This preserve is named for Potawatomi Chief Keepataw, whose tribe was friendly with the Voyageurs, only to be driven away by the European settlers who followed them. (The town of Lemont was also once named for Chief Keepataw, but it must not have sounded French enough.) Next door, Black Partridge Woods is named for another Potawatomi Chief. The Potawatomi were the dominant tribe in this area, as they were all along the Des Plaines, and they were still present when the village of Romeo was first settled in 1835 on Isle a La Cache – one of their last stands in the Chicago area. I’ll write more about this remarkable site later, when I discuss several Will County Forest Preserves that I walked in a single day. But suffice to say that Isle a La Cache, of all the preserves I visited along the river, does the most to recount the history of the area’s indigenous people.
Hikers on the Centennial Trail are never far from either the river or the Sanitary and Ship Canal, along with its industry and barge traffic. If you happen to be on the trail at noon you will hear lunch whistles reverberate in the valley. And when you complete the trail at Romeo Rd., it’s a short walk south on the bridge to see the Fish Dispersal Barrier in the San Ship — not that you can see much, since the electrified grids are of course under water. Nonetheless barges must take certain precautions when traversing the barrier so nobody gets electrocuted, and you may see one sail through with its crew tightly shut up in the pilot’s cabin.