We can fix Mill Creek now

On Monday, it will be one month that the pastoral waters of Mill Creek MetroParks have been closed to all public access due to pollution caused mainly by excess city sewage overflow.

This is the only closure of all the lakes in the park’s 125-year history.

For this atrocity, elected and appointed officials of the park, the city, the county and the state have but one thing to be grateful for:

This poor result is not of their doing.

It was done by other city and legal leaders 100 years ago – almost to the day.

Today’s edition of The Vindicator highlights that battle, and what you read today and Monday has been a labor of love for many of us the last couple of weeks.

Today we feature the words of park founder Volney Rogers from 1915 during one of his last battles for park purity.

In 1890, he used his own money to buy and protect the first forests of Mill Creek Park near Lanterman’s Mill – almost 2 miles of trees. He used more of his funds soon after to purchase nearby land that was soon to be quarried and scarred.

With that, Mill Creek Park was born.

Said Volney:

“I am trying to the best of my ability to do what I believe to be for the best interests of all the people of Youngstown at present and to come.

“To help keep men, women and children well, hearty, strong and happy, ought to be the mission of our parks. To do this, they must be given pure air, pure water and opportunities for rest and enjoyment with beautiful surroundings; and the best sanitary conditions possible.”

Volney was special. His words paint a great picture of a brilliant guy who was not afraid to announce it, too.

For 25 years, he bought, built and fought. And the Mill Creek we have today is a result of one man backed by a sturdy corps of his believers.

By 1915, at almost 70 and well into his fading years, the sewer battle was his most formidable, and became his last.

In today’s Vindicator, Bill Lawson, executive director of The Mahoning Valley Historical Society, does a great job bringing to life that 1915 scene:

The city – awash in greed and growth due to the steel industry – had all but killed the Mahoning River with raw sewage and industry dumping.

The federal government essentially cut off the city and industry from the vital river.

The feds forced local leaders to devise a modern sewer system to save itself from itself. Running sewer lines through and into the 25-year-old oasis that was Mill Creek was the cheapest route for the city.

The plan was as much a farce then as it is now.

Here was a great exchange printed in The Vindicator from a contentious Youngstown Chamber of Commerce meeting July 31, 1915. The speakers below are F.M. Lillie, city engineer, about his plans for building sewers through Mill Creek park, and Volney Rogers.

Question from chamber board:

“Mr. Lillie, what have you to say as to the likelihood of sewer overflow at the Slippery Rock picnic grounds and in Mill Creek park if sewers were built as you have planned?”

Mr. Lillie: “I would not expect any overflow.”

Mr. Rogers: “You didn’t expect any overflow on the Glenwood sewer either, did you?”

Mr. Lillie: “Yes I did, and I asked you for permission to overflow into a ravine in Mill Creek park and you refused to allow it.”

The board: “What have you to say as to the likelihood of park springs being contaminated by sewage, if a sewer were built as you have indicated on the maps?”

Mr. Lillie: “I think the springs can be protected by filling around the sewer with clay.”

Mr. Rogers: “These springs are close by the side of the road; the sewer would be above and close to them. No intelligent person would ever take a drink out of one of them if a sewer were built as proposed. These men, [pointing to Lillie and others] don’t know where the springs are.”

Volney went on a major offensive against the plan.

Part of his offensive were two full pages of arguments in the Aug. 11, 1915, Vindicator that was unearthed for us by Tim Seman of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County.

Volney’s words are what we re-create for you today, with the help of Lawson and others to put it into context.

As we know now, Volney lost the battle. City engineer Lillie and big industry won.

We have been polluting Mill Creek and the Mahoning River with sewage to this day. Volney left the city soon after and died a few years later in Colorado.

A monument to him was built in 1920. Several years later, the first of his lakes was closed due to sewage contamination.

And we’ve done little to fix the issue since. One leadership group has kicked the can down to the next.

We hope today and Monday you absorb all the ways we bring alive Volney’s fight: text, video, radio and more.

Spend some time to learn, but also spend some time to act.

As I said at the start today: Local leaders did not create this problem.

But we have the ability to say this is where it ends.

We are a 21st-century state and region.

We’re inventing new manufacturing ways and cars that run themselves. We are finding new energy while using less. Through smarter living and better medicine, we enjoy longer and improved lives.

Yet with all these 21st-century marvels, we live in a region where the most predictable human bodily function is allowed to flow back into our lives as if we all use medieval chamberpots.

We spend a lot of money on a lot of nonsense – personally and publicly. I outlined a few examples last month, and some of those ideas look better each week.

We need to channel our current attention and momentum to fix Mill Creek. It must be done in a way that’s more logical than the current plan of fixing it 25 years from now and with the poorest of this region footing the bill.

The only reason that plan was approved was because everyone signing off on it knew they would not be around to deal with it. Their predecessors did the same 15 and 25 years ago.

One man essentially built Mill Creek Park. The Vindicator celebrates Volney Rogers today and Monday – his brilliance, resilience, confidence and vision.

How shameful and small we look if one entire region cannot fix what one man launched with the vision that we would certainly benefit from his labor.

“I am trying to the best of my ability to do what I believe to be for the best interests of all the people of Youngstown at present and to come.”

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on Vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.