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The Town That Built Chicago’s Water Tower, Then Turned Its Quarries Into a Playground

Lemont’s story starts with the Illinois and Michigan Canal, built between the late 1830s and its completion in 1848 to link the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system. The settlement — first called Athens, briefly Palmyra, and Lemont by 1850 — grew fast as canal workers, many of them Irish immigrants, poured in; the village incorporated on June 9, 1873.

While digging the canal, workers uncovered a durable yellow dolomite stone that got marketed as “Athens Marble.” It turned out to be some of the best building stone in the region, and quarried Lemont stone went on to build the Chicago Water Tower — one of the few structures to survive the 1871 Great Chicago Fire — along with Holy Name Cathedral and Old Main at Northwestern University. By the late 1800s, a new wave of Polish, Bohemian, Austrian, and Italian immigrants had arrived to work the quarries, a history still visible in downtown Lemont’s 38 surviving limestone buildings, added to the National Register of Historic Places as the Lemont Downtown Historic District in 2016.

When cheaper stone and concrete ended the quarrying era in the early 1900s, the old flooded quarry pits sat mostly forgotten for decades — until 2020, when they reopened as The Forge: Lemont Quarries Adventure Park, a roughly 300-acre public recreation park built right around the old flooded dolomite pits and the historic canal. The same holes in the ground that supplied stone for some of Chicago’s most recognizable buildings are now where people go to paddle, zipline, and climb.