East Dundee's Fox River Hasn't Looked Like This in Almost 200 Years

Stand on the riverbank in downtown East Dundee this month and the water moves differently than it has for anyone currently living here. Not just faster after a storm, but structurally different, in a way that has nothing to do with rainfall and everything to do with a piece of concrete that used to sit upstream and no longer does.

That piece of concrete was the Carpentersville Dam. It stood in some form since the 1830s, rebuilt more than once over the following century and a half, according to Resource Environmental Solutions, the firm that helped take it out. Every person who has ever fished, paddled, or walked along this stretch of the Fox has done so next to an impounded, dam-slowed river. That stopped being true in November 2024, and East Dundee is only now catching up to what it means.

A Dam Older Than Anyone's Grandparents

The Forest Preserve District of Kane County owned the dam and nearly the entire shoreline for 2.5 miles upstream, a fact that made it the district's project to solve. Work to remove it was approved in the summer of 2024 after nearly a decade of planning, permitting, and pandemic delay, as the Daily Herald reported that August. Crews started in September 2024 and finished that November, a $1.2 million project sitting just upstream of Main Street in Carpentersville, a few minutes from East Dundee's own downtown.

Low-head dams like this one look harmless from a bridge. They are not. They flatten a river into something closer to a chain of ponds, trap sediment, choke off oxygen, and block fish from moving upstream to spawn. Removing one does not just let water through faster. It lets the river behave like a river again, for the first time in longer than anyone in East Dundee has been alive to notice.

Ten Miles, Not a Puddle

The practical result is a 10.2-mile stretch of open, connected water running from Algonquin down through Carpentersville, East Dundee, West Dundee, and into Elgin. Friends of the Fox River, the advocacy group that pushed for the removal, calls it the longest free-flowing stretch in Kane County. Part of that stretch already carries a National Water Trail designation from the U.S. Department of the Interior, granted in 2023 in anticipation of exactly this kind of restoration.

None of that shows up as a number worth arguing over. It shows up as a current where there used to be a flat pool, a paddle route where there used to be a portage, and a river that East Dundee residents are only beginning to relearn.

"A wonderful example of river magic."

That's how Gary Swick, president of the Friends of the Fox River board, described the newly freed river after the group's first organized paddle down it.

The First Paddle Since the River Came Loose

That paddle happened June 22, 2025, and it had a name nobody outside the group would guess on the first try: El Cardunal. Friends of the Fox River built the word from Carpentersville, East and West Dundee, and Algonquin, then added "El" for Elgin, the town organizers hope to reach on a future route once the paddle grows.

About 100 canoes and kayaks put in at Cornish Park in Algonquin and pulled out roughly six miles later near William C. Bartels Park in East Dundee, passing directly over the site of the former dam along the way, as Shaw Local's Northwest Herald reported. It was a 95-degree day with a heat index near 105, and organizers had arranged misting fans and electrolyte stations with help from the East Dundee Fire Protection District. Halfway through, about half the group stopped to cool off at Fox River Shores Forest Preserve, where a Kane County naturalist said he hopes to see the mussel population rebound in the river's newly oxygenated water in the coming years.

If you were on the water that day, or watched from a bridge, you saw something East Dundee hasn't had on tap in generations: a river you could actually follow, town to town, without hitting a wall of still water.

What This Means If You Want to Get on the Water

East Dundee's own downtown investments track the river directly, not the other way around. According to the village's 2025 year in review, the village opened both a new kayak launch along the Fox River and a new parking garage at Hill Street and River Street in 2025, the year after the dam came out.

If you're planning a first trip down this stretch, a few things are worth knowing before you load a kayak:

• The put-in point East Dundee added in 2025 sits along the river downtown, next to the new Hill Street and River Street parking garage, so parking and launch are close together rather than a hike apart.
• Friends of the Fox River has said it wants El Cardunal to become an annual tradition and eventually stretch the route as far as Elgin.
• The current stretch of open water runs the full 10.2 miles from Algonquin to Elgin, meaning East Dundee is no longer a dead end on the river. It's the middle of a route.

That last point is the one worth sitting with. For most of this river's history, East Dundee's stretch of the Fox was a local feature you visited, not a corridor you traveled through. It is becoming the second thing.

The Village Is Building Toward the River, Not Around It

The dam removal did not happen in isolation from everything else going on downtown, and the timing is not a coincidence worth ignoring. The same year East Dundee opened its river-adjacent parking garage and kayak launch, the village was also advancing redevelopment plans for two long-stalled downtown sites: the former Haeger Pottery property and the former Doederlein Lumberyard site, both a short walk from the water.

Further along, the village's Depot Park Master Plan includes design concepts for a new sound stage on a recently acquired parcel at 120 Railroad Street, part of a longer-term push to expand green and performance space downtown. Separately, a proposal called Heritage Station, still under village review as of last year, would bring 8,000 square feet of performing arts space, potentially a satellite site for Crystal Lake's Raue Center for the Arts, plus 6,000 square feet of retail to the same downtown core, as NBC Chicago reported. Developers behind that project have said construction could start as early as 2026 with completion by 2028.

None of these projects are enormous on their own. Together they read as a village betting that its downtown's future runs along the river, not despite it. That bet got easier to make the moment the water stopped being a flat, contained pool and started being something people would actually want to paddle, fish, and walk beside. This spring, an office building in the heart of downtown sold for $1.5 million, one more data point in what Shaw Local has tracked as a broader downtown resurgence taking shape at the same time the river itself changed underneath it.

The River You Live Next To Is Not the One You Grew Up With

If you've lived in East Dundee for any length of time, the honest version of this story is that you never actually saw this river the way it exists right now. The version you knew was slowed by a dam that predates your grandparents. The version running past Bartels Park today is closer to what the Fox looked like before Illinois built dams up and down its length in the first place.

That's worth walking down to see for yourself this season, whether you put a kayak in the water or just stand on the new stretch of riverbank near the parking garage and watch it move. The river changed. The rest of downtown is starting to change around it.

If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of the Fox actually offers, from riverside walkability to the kind of long-term neighborhood momentum a project like this signals, the team at Swanson Real Estate, Inc. has spent decades reading exactly these kinds of local shifts across the Fox Valley. Contact us when you're ready to talk about what it means for your own plans.