Detail of Lake Renwick island 



Renwick. The lake was named for Mr. Frank W. Ren- 

 wick, one of the three founders of Chicago Gravel, the 

 company that bought the property in 1913. 



We can also hazard a guess that the herons were not 

 at the lake. These birds like peace and quiet, and there 

 would have been little of either around Lake Renwick 70 

 years ago. 



There also wouldn't have been much of anything to 

 eat. The first certain fish in Lake Renwick were put there 

 sometime in the mid-twenties. Chicago Gravel paid for 

 two gondola cars full of piscines — species unknown — to 

 be transported on the EJ&.E to the Lake Renwick siding 

 from whence they could be dumped in the lake. At the 

 time, the lake drained into Lily Cache Creek, so a screen 

 was erected to prevent the fish from escaping. 



The fish arrived at just about the same time as the 

 dance hall, a lakeside building with movable walls that 

 could be pulled aside for summer ventilation. You can 

 imagine the youth of the time arriving in flivvers for a 

 night of what the owners described as "Your finest dance 

 floor, championship Charleston dancing, big city dance 

 music by Formento's Singing Syncopators." 



Powell's Mill came along in the thirties, a lakeside 

 restaurant decorated with a large, Dutch-style windmill 



that could be seen for miles at night when multi-colored 

 lights played upon it. Powell's offered barbeques, chili, 

 homemade bread, and hot coffee; but unfortunately, its 

 presence polluted the lake so badly that the beach had to 

 be closed. 



By the mid-forties, there was nothing left at Lake 

 Renwick but the Chicago Gravel Company. Liability 

 problems forced the company to use guards to keep out 

 the fishermen, and by the early fifties, the gravel digging 

 operations had been moved north of the EJ&.E tracks. 

 All that remained near the lake itself was a gravel wash- 

 ing operation. Gravel dug north of the tracks came in on 

 bottom-dumping railcars that dropped it at the foot of an 

 inclined conveyor. The conveyor hauled it up to screens 

 where the sand and gravel were sorted by size, with the 

 bigger gravel pieces dropping out into a crusher. 



This processing created some noise, but apparently 

 not enough to bother the birds, who arrived — well, actu- 

 ally nobody knows exactly when they did arrive. As in 

 most everything else about Lake Renwick, opinions differ. 



Some long-time employees of Chicago Gravel say 

 that herons have been around for 50 years, but we can 

 reasonably guess that the birds they saw so long ago were 

 wandering from river-bottom nesting colonies and set- 



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