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Rogers fought sewer encroachment on park
YOUNGSTOWN
The lengthy article placed in The Youngstown Vindicator a century ago by Volney Rogers, Mill Creek Park’s founder, marked the beginning of the multiyear debate and legal battle over the sewer installation, which Rogers predicted would encroach on public enjoyment of the park.
The Board of Park Commissioners sued the city to block the installation.
Judge C.M. Wilkins of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court ruled June 14, 1916, the rapidly growing city had the legal right to construct the sewer through the park to serve the city’s Fosterville neighborhood.
Judge Wilkins concluded the public benefit from the sewer installation outweighed the threat of water pollution in the park.
The legal battle ended in early 1919, when the Ohio Supreme Court lifted all injunctions and let the sewer installation begin that spring.
Rogers “planned to leave Youngstown immediately to avoid witnessing any construction of the [sewer] system he so valiantly opposed,” wrote Bridgett M. Williams in her 1992 book, “The Legacy of Mill Creek Park, a Biography of Volney Rogers.”
Having boarded a Chicago-bound train Feb. 8, 1919, to begin a long trip to the Western states, Rogers was caught in a surprise blizzard in Colorado and died of pneumonia Dec. 3, 1919.
Meanwhile, the Sept. 21, 1919, Vindicator reported that construction began around May 1 of that year for the 5-mile-long sewer through the park, which included 54-inch, 42-inch and 36-inch concrete pipe.
With an excavation through 18 feet of rock below the Lake Glacier dam, “the west bank of Glacier has been a mass of loose dirt all summer,” The Vindicator reported. “At present, some of the park roads are torn up.”
A similar construction “mess” in the park will be repeated a century later when the city eliminates combined storm and sanitary sewer overflows into the park under an agreement with the U.S. and Ohio Environmental Protection agencies, Mayor John A. McNally said recently.
The agreement calls for $147 million in city sewer improvements to be completed by the end of 2033.
Included in the agreement are city waste-treatment plant improvements, in addition to elimination of the combined storm and sanitary sewer overflows, which discharge a mix of storm water and sewage after heavy rains.
After the 1919 sewer installation, it wasn’t long before Rogers’ dire predictions concerning the impact of sewer encroachment on the park materialized.
“Swimming was a significant recreational activity at lakes Glacier and Cohasset until the late 1920s, when contamination from Youngstown’s sewers made the waters unfit for this sport,” wrote Carol Potter and Rick Shale in their 2005 book, “Images of America: Historic Mill Creek Park.”
When they wrote the book, Potter was Mill Creek MetroParks development director, and Shale was a park commissioner.