Read time: 7 min.

The Wabash River is a force to be reckoned with. As many as two hundred people perished during the Great Flood of 1913, which left the swollen waters of the Wabash sprawling seven miles wide¹! Fortunately, the J. Edward Roush Dam has held the river’s mighty waters back for half a century. In what’s becoming an occasional theme here, I recently found some photos I took of it fourteen years ago.

January 30, 2010 was a productive Saturday. I finished a rare morning shift at Subway, loaded a laundry hamper into the car, and headed to my parents’ house in Muncie. My passion for history was newly emergent, so I stopped to take photos of Fort Wayne’s aging Elmhurst High School on my way out of town.

It’s funny now, but my new drugstore Vivitar made me feel invincible. I had a flip phone then, but that camera meant I could take photos of anything! The problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to document beyond Elmhurst. Fortunately, inspiration struck: I doubled back on Engle Road to Jefferson Boulevard and US-24. Twenty minutes of driving led me to Huntington.

I was soon at the Roush Lake Dam. I’d ridden over the dam on State Road 5 a couple times as a kid on trips to my Dad’s house, but we’d never stopped or bothered to learn much about it. I was a full-fledged grownup on my trip home, so I thought, and I noticed a pull-off to a picnic area just before the spillway. That’s where I made my turn.

The snaking path to the bottom of the dam led straight to the sight of a playground. The unexpected juxtaposition captured my imagination and my cheap camera empowered me. I hunted for a variety of interesting angles until I decided to find out more about the place.

The concept of a Wabash River dam above Huntington dates to the 1950s. Citing “present terrible flood conditions in Indiana²,” U.S. senators Homer Capehart, William Jenner, and others urged Congress to approve a bill authorizing a three-dam flood control project in the Upper Wabash valley³. The bill eventually passed in 1958³.

Between 1956 to 1960, flood damage to farms in the Wabash Valley surpassed $60 million, or a whopping $623 million today⁴. The first of the big Wabash dams, Salamonie, was completed in April 1966 to impound that river southeast of Huntington. The second, Mississinewa, blocked that river’s flow near Peru and opened the following year⁵. Ground was broken for the $6 million Huntington Dam on June 26, 1965⁶.

Designing the Huntington Lake Dam, as it was then known, involved some special considerations. Because it impounded the Wabash River instead of its smaller tributaries, a typical earthen embankment with a concrete intake tower wouldn’t suffice. Instead, the project required a series of sluice gates and radial tainter gates to release its waters⁷. The sluice gates below the dam were designed to let out low and moderate amounts of water, while the metal tainter gates were installed for emergencies. To date, they’ve never been opened⁸.

The dam didn’t just require a more elaborate control structure than its peers; it also necessitated a staggering amount of materials. More than 1.1 million cubic yards of earth, 91,000 cubic yards of concrete, 39,000 cubic yards of stone, 23,000 square yards of roadway, and 3,600 linear yards of guard rail were used to build the dam and relocate State Road 5 to the top of it⁹!

The dam came online in 1968. A winter of heavy rains in the Upper Wabash Valley gave each of the three dams their first test the following year. Engineers believed their presence would lower the flood stage by as much as seven feet¹⁰, and cities like Huntington, Delphi, Kokomo, Lafayette, Logansport, Marion, and Wabash were spared significant damage. The trend continues today.

Huntington Lake was renamed to commemorate eight-term US Representative J. Edward Roush in 1996¹¹. At ninety-one feet tall and 6,500 feet long¹², the dam impounds a 900-acre lake from a drainage area of more than seven square hundred miles¹³. Those limits were pushed in 2015 when rain from Tropical Storm Bill nearly filled the reservoir to the brim.

At summer pool, the lake sits at an elevation of 749 feet above sea level. Nine years ago, the water rose fifty feet higher! I drove over the dam just before the highway was closed on a trip to Fort Wayne. Seeing water lapping at the top of the Tainter gates was terriftying! By June 19, the lake had risen to 796 feet above sea level, just nine feet below the top of the dam.

Meanwhile, officials released water at a rate of about 22,000 gallons per second¹⁴. Once the water reached 798 feet, the dam began to discharge more than 48,000 gallons a second. On June 20, the release was increased to nearly 60,000 gallons¹⁵. More than 850 bathtubs of water flowed from the sluice gates every second! Still, officials never had to open the Tainter gates. Eventually, the reservoir returned to its regular pool.

I was surprised at how running across these photos of the Roush Dam made me feel. Their resolution won’t win me any awards, but I took them at an age where a crappy Vivitar camera was enough to make me feel like I could take on the world. Life has become increasingly more difficult and complicated since I took them, but finding these photos and writing about them serves as a reminder that I, too, can stand up to powerful currents with purpose and determination.

Sources Cited
1 Mitchell, D. (2019, March 22). Washed away: How the Great Flood of 1913 devastated Indiana. The Indianapolis Star. Web. Retrieved December 30, 2023. 
2 Senators Push Flood Projects (1958, June 24). The Seymour Daily Tribune. p. 1.
3 Committee Approves Upper Wabash Dams (1958, June 14). The Logansport Press. p. 1. 
4 Hoosiers As Aid to Curb Floods (1960, April 7). The Terre Haute Star. Pp. 1-2. 
5 Reservoir to be put into use Jan. 1, officials say (1967, October 17). The Kokomo Morning Times. p. 1.
6 Ground Is Broken For Huntington Dam (1965, June 26). The Dubois County Daily Herald [Jasper]. p. 1.
7 Studying Low Bid For Dam At Huntington (1965, April 15). The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 20.
8 Labashosky, C. (2015, June 29). Roush Lake reaches capacity. The US Army Corps of Engineers. Louisville District. Web. Retrieved December 29, 2023.
9 (See footnote 7).
10 First Test (1969, February 7). The Elwood Call-Leader. p. 2.
11 Bipartisan Waters (1996, October 6). The Indianapolis Star. p. 27.
12 DNR, 20100. DNR list facts on Asian Carp in Wabash River (2010, July y7). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 7. 
13 J. Edward Roush Lake (n.d.). The US Army Corps of Engineers, Chicago District [Chicago]. Web. Retrieved December 30, 2023. 
14 Klepper, C. (2015, June 19). Controlled release from Roush Lake expected to begin Friday night at 9. The Huntington County TAB [Huntington]. Web. Retrieved December 29, 2023.
15 (See footnote 14).