Chapter 6: Generating Energy (and Occasionally Controversy)
Chapter 6: Generating Energy (and Occasionally Controversy)
Alongside agriculture, the generation of energy from natural resources has influenced the ongoing evolution of rural Illinois in multiple ways, as the companion exhibitions and programs presented by the Crossroads: Change in Rural America host organizations emphasized. In some instances, resource extraction and energy generation have intersected with economic, social, and cultural tensions, eliciting controversy and conflict.
“If it can’t be grown, it must be mined,” declares a bumper sticker that has been known to appear on vehicles in rural Illinois. Some of the companion exhibitions and programs presented by Crossroads: Change in Rural America host organizations discussed mining or the generation of energy from fuels obtained by that method.
Several coal mines were closed and mine shafts filled in order to construct Shelbyville Dam and form Lake Shelbyville. The impact of coal mining upon not only the economy but also the social fabric of Shelby and surrounding counties during much of the twentieth century is evidenced by Sundown Town, a 2018 novel by Kevin Corley and Douglas E. King, the subject of a well-attended program presented in conjunction with the opening of Crossroads at the Lake Shelbyville Visitors Center.[1] (Sundown Town will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.)
Around the same time that the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Kaskaskia River near Shelbyville, the Corps also straightened the section of the river from Fayetteville to its confluence with the Mississippi, cutting off twenty-six meanders and reducing its length from fifty-two to thirty-six miles to make it more navigable by barge. Additionally, the Corps constructed a lock and dam less than a mile from the river’s mouth to assist barges in making the transition from the Kaskaskia to the Mississippi.[2]
One of the main reasons why the Kaskaskia River Navigation Project was initiated was that 1.8 billion tons of coal lay within fifteen miles of the river, according to a 1967 estimate,[3] and much of that coal was mined and transported by Peabody Coal Company. For those reasons, the channelized section of the Kaskaskia was colloquially (and derisively) called “Peabody’s Ditch.”[4]
Despite declines in the coal industry, the navigation channel still regularly accommodates barges hauling materials to and from agribusiness and manufacturing facilities along that section of the river.[5] (Although the Kaskaskia River Navigation Project was not among the topics directly addressed by the Crossroads host organizations’ companion exhibitions, its creation, maintenance, management, and use—and controversies surrounding all of the above[6]—fascinatingly illustrate significant changes that have occurred in rural Illinois in the past half century.)
Shelby Electric Cooperative, which began providing electricity to its member-owners in 1939,[7] is still going strong even though there are no longer any coal mines in opera