Located on the Mississippi River about 11 miles north of
downtown St. Louis and five miles south of the confluence of the
Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, the Chain of Rocks Water
Treatment Facility is presently the largest treatment facility
in St. Louis. With its ten high service pumps, the plant is
capable of pumping 450 million gallons per day. The location and
plant get their names from a large shoal, or rocky rapids, which
made that stretch of the Mississippi extremely dangerous to
navigate. Because of the low-water dam built by the Corps of
Engineers in the 1960's, little of the Chain of Rocks is visible
today except during extreme low water conditions. The Chain of
Rocks had been chosen as a site for St. Louis waterworks by
James Kirkwood in 1865. However, Kirkwood's plan was initially
rejected, and construction on the Chain of Rocks Plant did not
begin until 1887. It opened in 1894. The designer of Chain of
Rocks was Minard Holman, who functioned as the first chief
engineer of the plant and later bec