Route 50 passes Carlyle Lake, the largest lake wholly within the state of Illinois, fifty miles east of St. Louis. The much larger Lake Michigan, with banks near Chicago in northern Illinois, touches on parts of other states.
A dam, shown above, created the lake in the 1960s by blocking the Kaskaskia River. It took several years for the river to fill the planned reservoir area and create today’s lake.
Long before the dam was built, an important road passed through the area. That road had once simply been a path through the prairie, blazed by Native Americans, but when settlers arrived, they used the path for delivery of one of their most important needs: salt.
In 1808, surveyors marked the route as a wagon road, to improve the delivery of salt and other supplies. They used horses to lay out part of that road — not men on horses, but horses, by themselves. Surveyors led a female horse a day’s distance away from her newly born colt. When they released her, the mare used her instincts to return to her foal. The surveyors followed the mare, noted her path, and the horse choices became part of the road.
People in the area called the new route the Goshen Road, because at first it ran from a pioneer settlement named Goshen to a salt works near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. It then followed the old Native American path toward newly settled communities. For a while, it was the most important route in what is now southern Illinois.
When the Goshen Road reached the Kaskaskia River, it couldn’t go around, because the river flows north to south for 325 miles, and wagons couldn’t ford the river after heavy rain. A small suspension bridge built in 1859, over 100 years before the nearby dam, solved the problem.
The nearby town of Carlyle, Illinois, named the bridge the General Dean Suspension Bridge, in honor of a resident who was taken prisoner during the Korean War. Shown in the photo above, the General Dean Bridge provided a major crossing of the Kaskaskia until 1920, when Route 50 bridged the river just downstream.
It may be hard to believe while walking across the short General Dean bridge, but the Kaskaskia is the second largest river system in Illinois, after the Illinois River. It drains over 5,700 square miles, from central Illinois to its mouth where it reaches the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi River forms the border between the states of Illinois, to the east, and Missouri, to the west, and near the junction of the Kaskaskia and the Mississippi, you’ll find the first capitol of Illinois, the town of Kaskaskia. In 1881, a flood diverted the Mississippi into a new channel, putting Kaskaskia the west of the river. So to get there you’ll have to go through Missouri, because the state of Missouri now surrounds the town of Kaskaskia, still part of Illinois.
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Photos by the author.