History reveals itself

Janke finds joy in restoring Portage Canal

Doing construction from a barge is fun and all, but for Steve Janke the interesting part of the Portage Canal restoration project was seeing how things were built 150 years ago.

“I know how we can do it now,” said Janke, president and founder of Janke General Contractors Inc., “and it’s a lot easier than they were able to do in the past.”

Janke said he found the steel lock gates particularly fascinating.

“It’s a certain type of steel bent in a fashion so that it also created support to hold a 24-foot wall of water behind it,” he said. “They must have had some steam press.”

For the project, developed by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and the city of Portage to rejuvenate the city’s downtown area, Janke General Contractors needed to refurbish gates that were welded shut in 1951.

The gates, 18 feet high and 24 feet long, had to be cut in half to get them out, Janke said. Once removed from the canal, they were sandblasted, repainted and put back in place.

But because the canal is close to neighboring buildings, Janke said, much of the work needed to be done from the water.

“It wasn’t the run-of-the-mill type of job,” Janke said. “The buildings were within 8 feet of the proposed retaining wall. We had to do pretty much everything from a barge.”

For the job, Janke workers also had to replace an old lock system. But what was notable, Janke said, was the discovery of a lock system that was even older than the one they were restoring.

While driving sheeting, Janke said, work crews reached a point where they could no longer drive down the way they expected. After some investigation, workers discovered the top of the rocky foundation of a lock system that predated the one they were restoring.

“When the canal was first built [the locks] were built out of wood,” he said. “The [canal] walls were all hand-laid rock. When the new lock was built, the old lock was abandoned in place. No one knew the old wooden lock was there.”

Removing the old floor and rock-laid walls added $100,000 to the project, he said.

Now that the job is done, Janke said, the finished product is something he and the city can take pride in.

“Being able to re-establish a part of Wisconsin history is something I’m proud of,” Janke said. “The canal was neglected. It was a weed-infested eyesore before we started.

“But now, the canal is clear, and you can see fish swimming in its waters.”

— Janine Anderson