Rensselaer Journal, Volume 12, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 December 1902 — Great Drainage Ditch. [ARTICLE]

Great Drainage Ditch.

Preliminary steps are nnder way in the northwestern counties of Indiana, including LaPorte, Starke, Porter, Lake and Jasper, to erect what will probably be the largest artificial waterway of Its kind east of the Mississippi river. When completed it will reclaim hundreds of thousands of acres of Kankakee marsh lands, which are now regarded as worthless. A contract has been let for the first fourteen miles in Laporte and Starke counties for $120,000. Ths ditch will be eighty feet wide and sixteen feet deep. It is the plan of the other counties to continue the great ditch to the Illinois line, a distance of sixty miles. , The total cost will be about a million dollars. The project has been taken up by the owners of large ranches along the Kankakee. The payment is to be made by assessments on benefits derived from the ditch.