As Chicago boomed in the 1850s, growing into a major lake port and industrial center, mud became a major problem. The lakeshore marsh on which the city was being built seemed bottomless. A popular story of the time had it that a passerby came upon a man whose head and shoulders protruded from the muck in the middle of the street. "Can I help?" asked the passerby. "No, thank you," replied the man. "I have a fine horse under me."

The humor belied the serious nature of the problem. The quagmire made Chicago a breeding ground for deadly cholera, which swept the city periodically and in 1854 killed more than 5 percent of the population. The city tried grading its streets so that water ran into the Chicago River, and when that failed it tried planking them over. But the planks warped and rotted from all the moisture beneath. On the last day of 1855, the newly created Chicago Board of Sewerage Commissioners finally came up with a plan to lift Chicago out of the ooze.Engineer E.S. Chesbrough of Boston, whom the board had hired to study the problem, recommended installing a storm-sewer system, the first comprehensive sewage system in the country. But since the city was only 3 or 4 feet above the level of Lake Michigan, underground sewers would not drain properly into the river and lake unless the entire elevation of Chicago was raised. And so the Common Council, as the City Council was then called, passed ordinances that raised the grade level of streets across the city. The increases varied, but for streets next to the river, the boost amounted to about 10 feet.

Over a period of almost two decades, Chicago's buildings were jacked up 4 to 14 feet, higher foundations were built beneath them, the storm sewers were placed on top of the streets, and the streets were then filled up to the level of the front doors of the raised buildings. To raise larger buildings, an enterprising newcomer to the city named George Pullman perfected a method involving hundreds of men turning thousands of large jackscrews at the same time. Many smaller structures, especially houses, were simply moved to new locations. "Never a day passed," noted a visitor at the time, "that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine."

The raising of Chicago became the talk of the nation, but for the people of Chicago, the enormous undertaking not only solved a problem, it testified to the young city's character. "Nothing," noted an early historian, "better illustrates the energy and determination with which the makers of Chicago set about a task when once they had made up their minds, than the speed and thoroughness with which they solved the problem of the city's drainage and sewage."