The flood sequence: the gage record

MAJ-9 DUG · U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY GAGES

Walkerton's water trouble is real but it is not a river town's: the Kankakee's main stem never enters the town, and the flood sequence prints from the basin's gages and the township's own wet ground. The sequence runs in three regimes. First, the pre-drainage marsh: Chapman in 1880 found "a considerable portion of the land of Lincoln township is marshy and wet, but is fast being reclaimed by draining" — the town was born on the Kankakee marsh fringe, and Potato Creek and the ditches, not a river, are its waters. Second, the basin's great nineteenth-century floods, which the U.S. Geological Survey carries as extremes outside the gage record at the Wilmington station: floods in 1883 and 1887 reached a stage of 16.7 feet, discharge never determined. (One printed divergence is banked as a delta candidate: the land leg of this build carries a "Campbell 1882" flood telling; the Survey's outside-record extremes are 1883 and 1887 — a one-year gap between the local telling and the federal one, with the Campbell text itself as the settler.) Third, the gage era, at the headwaters gage nearest the town — Kankakee River at Davis, Indiana, record from 1924: the maximum daily mean flow stands at 1,920 cubic feet per second on March 20, 1982, and the maximum peak stage at 13.79 feet on July 19, 1996; downstream at Shelby the basin's modern benchmark crested in the same March 1982 event at 7,650 cubic feet per second. March 1982 is therefore the modern flood of record for the town's basin; the town's own street-level flood memory — which streets, which years — stands in the Independent's runs and prints as the residue with that settler.

Principal sources: U.S. Geological Survey station records 05515500 (Kankakee River at Davis, IN), 05518000 (at Shelby, IN), 05527500 (near Wilmington, IL); Chapman (1880), Lincoln Township chapter (the marsh and the draining).