116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Time Machine: Cedar River dam replaced C.R. grain mills
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H.G. Angle built a grain mill along the Cedar River around 1860 at First Street and F Avenue. His mill joined two others already there, Brown Mill and Anchor Mills.
When William S. Cooper of Rochester, N.Y., purchased Angle’s mill in 1862, it became Cooper’s Union Flouring Mills, or, more commonly, Cooper’s Mill.
Cooper and his wife, Margaret, were the parents of Robert and Anna. Anna later became the wife of Cedar Rapids entrepreneur S.G. Armstrong.
In 1891, the mill was recognized as one of the oldest manufacturers in the city.
“The senior Mr. Cooper has been in the milling business in this city for over 30 years,” The Gazette informed its readers Sept. 14, 1891, “and the history of his mill covers nearly every one of the great improvements in that line of business.”
For several weeks, carpenters and millwrights had been busy in the factory, upgrading existing machinery and installing new bolts, “the finest and latest system of flour dressers,” from Milwaukee. (Bolts were screens used to sort flour from coarse to fine.)
Cooper died in 1914, the same year that the three mills on North First Street were demolished, one by one, for a raceway for a new dam being erected for the city in partnership with the Iowa Railway & Light Co. (forerunner of Iowa Electric Light & Power) by Cleary-White Construction Co.
A contract for a new F Avenue Dam was signed by the city council and officials of Iowa Railway & Light on May 27, 1913.
Ira G. Hedrick of Kansas City, Mo., drew up plans for a concrete and steel dam to be built 50 feet downstream from the site of an old timber dam. The plans included a lock for transferring boats from one level to another.
The dam was to be 686 feet in length and 10 feet high from bedrock to the top of the concrete work. A “flash board” raised the dam another 2.5 feet, raising the water level. That, in turn, was expected to benefit motor boating on the river.
“The construction details of the new dam and especially the ‘flash board,’ are extremely interesting,” according to The Gazette. The dam was ”to be built of solid concrete, laid on bedrock sixteen feet wide at the base. The upstream side will rise sheer from bedrock to the crest, while the downstream side will drop in a clean reverse curve, after the fashion of a roller coaster track, from the crest to the river bottom. On top of the concrete work will be built the flash board. This is a solid bulkhead, braced with steel rods for extra strength, and hinged at its bottom edge to the concrete work. Every sixty feet across the dam piers will be built and in these piers will be hung heavy counterweights, attached to the top of the flash board with steel cables.
“The object of these counterweights is to balance the weight of the flash board and the pressure of two and one-half feet of water which it will hold back above the top of the concrete work.”
Even though a new bridge was going to be built about 100 feet below the dam, it still had a 4-foot-wide pedestrian footbridge added to it, suspended from the counterweight piers.
The city accepted the dam from Cleary-White Construction on April 12, 1916. It then turned it over to Iowa Railway & Light with rental of $31 a day. The city got a reduction of $4 a day for the lights used by the city.
In all, the city came out ahead. It paid Cleary-White a total of $130,842. Other costs, including the bond issue, brought the total to $150,000. “When every bill is paid there will be about $8,000 left in the dam fund,” Commissioner Zika said.
The F Avenue dam had been in use for more than half a century in 1965 when major things were happening in the city. The dam was up for replacement as part of an urban renewal plan that was revitalizing the city.
The old dam was eating up $18,000 a year in repairs. While the concrete had been replaced over a 10-year period, the steel flood gates were corroded and the counterweights were “out of plumb,” according to Waterworks Supt. George Lee.
In 1972, ownership of the dam was still held jointly by the city and Iowa Electric Light & Power Co. It was transferred entirely to the city to clear the way for construction of a new Five-in-One dam and bridge that included Interstate 380.
The old dam and bridge stood in silent witness as the new structure went up yards away. When it was completed in 1978, Cramer Brothers Construction of Des Moines was hired to remove the F Avenue bridge and the nearby dam as well as the timber and stone dam it replaced.
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