Court Street bridge over the Beazer

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This post card shows bicyclers riding across a bridgeover old Beazer Ditch on Court street, in Crown Point. | Photo Provided~Sun-Times Media

Updated: February 15, 2012 10:04AM

Thanks to the historic digging of city resident Bill Pouch Sr., we now have a photo of a bridge over the old Beazer Ditch in Crown Point.

Pouch loves to repair clocks and follow the history of his city in photographs. He loves to find old photographs and postcards and put them on his Facebook page.

He has posted this picture postcard from the 1920s of a “Sunday bike ride north on South Court Street just before South Street.” At the time South Court Street was also know as Ruffle Shirt Hill because of the big fancy houses built by patricians of the city.

As is visible, the people are riding their bicycles across a bridge on Court Street. That is one of the bridges going over the Beasor Ditch.

According to a map put out by the city a few years ago the Beazer ran north from the area across from Solon Robinson Elementary School and west of the cemetery, flowing in a curve northwest and crossing through property along East street, then crossing Main Street behind the houses facing on Court Street and then once again turning west under the bridge on Court street next to the “harp house.”

The ditch then continued west until it turned north again, flowing under South Street and on the west side of West Street through what is now the Wheeler Middle School football field, continuing north through where the Crown Point Little League now is located.

It eventually crossed back east past Main Street between North and Porter streets, and then heading north along East Street to travel north along the east side of North Main Street where it flowed into the Beaver Dam Ditch.

That cleared water from the south side to the north side of the area that became the city of Crown Point.

Bill’s collection includes photos of the old dance hall on Cedar Lake that used to be where the Dairy Queen on East Lake Shore Drive is now located.

But I digress. This story is about the Beazer. There are many spellings of this waterway since spelling of English words and names were quite varied and optional at one time in our history. I have found it spelled as Beasor, Beaser, Beazer, Beazor and even Beezore. The most common have been Beazer and Beasor.

It is a bit of a misnomer to call it, or Beaver Dam, a ditch. It is common practice here to call a waterway a ditch, while in other parts of the country that body of flowing water would be called a creek or stream.

Perhaps because it was a dry season when the settlers originally found these waterways, the word “ditch” was used.

Waterways that were little trickles at the bottom of banks that were deep were just considered unimportant ditches by the people who named them.

They forgot that ditches have causes. The wet season or major rains can make both Beaver Dam Ditch and the Beazer Ditch flow as a fast moving stream, taking storm water runoff from the prairies and forests all the way to Deer Creek and to Lake Michigan.

Thanks to Bill Pouch we now have evidence of a real waterway.

According to a friend of Bill’s, a large tile was put in it in the early 1960s and it was covered up. The tile wasn’t large enough. In a flood situation not only has this friend seen the Beazer come alive again and run like a river through that area, but so have the residents whose basements have flooded because the Beazer has truly not been tamed, yet.

The city’s West Street project should give more relief, but something still needs being done to fix some broken drain tiles from Wells Street to West Street. Hope and help is on the way.