The “Well There’s Your Problem” engineering disasters podcast’s latest episode is out, and it’s about Love Canal. If you don’t know about Love Canal, it’s worth listening to either this or Swindled’s episode on it. It’s depressing, but in an important way—one of the key events that led to the creation of CERCLA and by extension Superfund.
Love Canal was originally part of Model City, a planned community in New York proposed in 1890 by a man named William T. Love; the canal itself would be a hydroelectric project, with the town growing up around it. As Wikipedia puts it:
The Panic of 1893 caused investors to end sponsorship of the project.[10] Then in 1906, environmental groups successfully lobbied Congress to pass a law, designed to preserve Niagara Falls, prohibiting the removal of water from the Niagara River.[11] Only one mile (1.6 km) of the canal was dug, about 50 feet (15 m) wide and 10–40 feet (3–12 m) deep, stretching northward from the Niagara River.[10][12]
The Panic of 1907 combined with the development of the transmission of electrical power over great distances, creating access to hydroelectric power far from water sources, proved disastrous. Love's remaining investors forced Love to abandon the project. The last piece of property owned by his corporation was lost to foreclosure and sold at public auction in 1910.
Eventually Hooker Chemical started dumping chemicals into Love Canal, then realized it was a liability and sold it to a school district with the proviso it not be developed. It was, and the result was one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about William Love, because of an exchange about 56 minutes into the podcast:
Justin Roczniak: “William T. Love moved on to other projects. Model City remained a hamlet, as it is to this day.”
Alice Caldwell-Kelly: “Do we know anything about what he went on to do?”
Roz: “No. He disappeared. He completely disappeared.”
Alice: “Went over the falls.”
Roz: “Yeah. Is that his real name? I don’t know.”
As late as the 1990s, during a retrospective on Model City and Love Canal, writers were talking about Love mysteriously:
“He disappeared from the face of the earth,” says Ralph Love of nearby Ransomville, whose grandfather was a cousin of William Love1
No. Or, well: not anymore.
William Thomasson Love was born on May 26th, 1856, in Keokuk, Iowa, the son of federal judge James M. Love. He passed the bar exam and became a lawyer for the Chicago and North Western Railway. In 1883, he was at the front of the line for land filings when the Huron, SD land office opened.2 Here he seems to have gotten a taste for speculation.
Except that—having waited for two days and nights for the office to open—Love learned that the filings were all to be treated as though they’d arrived simultaneously. And so, instead, he also seems to have gotten a taste for fraud. When he came to Niagara Falls in 1892, he claimed to have been responsible for settling Guthrie, Oklahoma three years earlier. According to Love, he had settled 15,000 people there during an 1889 land boom. According to the Oklahoma Territorial Museum in Guthrie, there is no mention of Love in any local history books.1
And in any case, he was busy by then, pitching the idea of “South Huron” near what is today South Dakota’s 8th-largest city and was then a C&NW stop. South Huron, Love said, would come complete with a proposed dam3 and a “rapid transit motor line […] comfortably heated in cold weather.”4
Obviously, that didn’t happen. Model City, similarly, didn’t happen. By 1896, the sheriff was repossessing the construction equipment Love intended to use to dig his canal and build his streets5. Love was nowhere to be found. He frequently claimed to be traveling to Europe, seeking foreign investors; an 1897 article says he is headed to England, “in the interest of a gold mining company in the Northwest.”6
There is no evidence he ever left the United States, at least before 1917 when he filed for his first passport.
Well… that he left the American territories before 1917. He tried Alaska next. By 1903, he was back to being a lawyer, where an article describing a trial in Nome says he “added the purchase and sale of evidence to [his] other accomplishments.”7 He tried and failed to get the town of Cordova, Alaska incorporated, failing at this hard enough that his name would be notorious there a decade and a half later.
That would be when they saw his name in the papers again, because of Lomax.
By 1910 or so, Love was apparently bored of lawyering and seeking marks in Puget Sound.8 Washingtonians didn’t bite, though, so he headed back east. He bounced around farms in Peoria until he found someone willing to give him options on 25,000 acres in Henderson County for what he pitched as “Lomax City”—in later reporting also sometimes called New Lomax.
The town of Lomax, Ill. has a company called the Lomax Town Co., which is out with an offer to give investors 14 per cent. on an investment in a limited issue of bonds which will be sold at 50 cents on the dollar […] the minute $100,00 is realized, the company says, from the sale of these bonds, the sum will be used for a “quick development” that will realize to the company $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 from lot sales. See how easy the money will roll in?9
Of course, the money didn’t roll in, at least for anyone not named William T. Love. A year after the Financial World breathlessly proclaimed “that great ‘Forward Movement’ which is to make Lomax the Wonder of the Central West,” Love was being sued. He was again gone, having netted $250,000 in the process, two years after the Sycamore postmaster first noticed the “questionable advertising” being sent through his post office.10
Not that he was to be deterred. Even as Lomax failed, Love was trying to make Rileyville, Illinois—a hamlet consisting of “several residences, or rather concoctions of dry goods boxes and canvas”—happen, sending letters to his town of birth soliciting investors. “The feasibility of making a large city out of this little hamlet,” the Keokuk Daily Gate City said, “seems very improbable.”16
Love cloaked himself in the guise of the garden city movement, a utopian vision of cities surrounded by urban green belts. Naturally, the movement ate Love up as only credulous urban visionaries can:
American people are apt to either entirely ignore a great idea or take it up with overwhelming vigour and eagerness. The Garden City idea has captured their imagination. Newspaper after newspaper comes across the Atlantic bearing spectacular headlines and announcements, all of which bear ample testimony to their whole-hearted appreciation of the Garden City message and the speaker who gives it.
One of the first places [Garden Cities and Town Planning Association spokesman Ewart] Culpin visited was the new model city of Lomax (Illinois) on the Mississippi River, laid out with separate areas for factories, parks, public buildings, etc. The planning is based wholly on radial and checker-board ideas. The Lomax Herald, in an edition devoted largely to reports and extracts from Mr. Culpin’s illustrated address, proclaims it as “a message of great and vital importance to America as a people and a nation.” Although the total population of Lomax is only 400 so far… [emphasis mine]11
The total population of Lomax, IL. today is 454.
William Love bounced back from this failure, of course. Probably the quarter-million dollars he stole helped. In February, 1917 he testified before the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry about the garden city movement, during which he was essentially called a socialist.12 In 1927, still living in Galesburg, he announced that he was walking 238 miles to Dearborn, Michigan to ask Henry Ford for help with the “farm problem.” And to talk up “rammed earth houses, which he believes can be economically constructed, an adaptation from the adobe homes in some sections of the Southwest.”13 In 1928, he ran for Congress.
The last time he really made the news before he actually disappeared (he was in his 70s by then), he’s back to his old tricks. This time it’s in Delaware, where he says he has 15,000 acres for “New City,” Delaware.14 Did this happen? No, of course it did not. A 1931 article dismisses him as “Brother Love,” something of a harmless kook.15 He ran for congress in again in 1932 and 1936, in New Jersey this time, and received 71 votes.
He last appears in the 1940 census; death records from the 40s are not available in New Jersey, but presumably he died sometime before 1950. His wife preceded him in 1928, being killed in an automobile accident. Reporting at the time portrayed Love as a penniless hitchhiker, seeking work like a hobo—that his wife was found with a letter in her pocket saying he was down to his last half-dollar, and he was pleading with her not to tell the landlord that he was broke. Notwithstanding (he was, evidently, out of town at the time), when he was found he wired money to pay for her burial expenses. So that seems like another lie, or more likely added color by journalists; she is interred at the local cemetery in Oquawka to this day.17
On these more idiosyncratic grounds, presumably, Love is described in some contemporary sources as being misguided but sincere, someone whose ambitions were simply too big for his ability to deliver—a tragic figure who was never able to see the garden city come to life. As David Germain quotes the Lewiston town historian in 1993: “I do think he had a good idea there. If he’d had the money, he might have done it.”1 Or, at worst, a kind of hard-luck crank.
In my opinion, this is absolute horseshit. Love got his start as a railroad con man like so many other railroad con men, swindling people into investing in towns that were never actually meant to be, built on land that could not support them. When that proved insufficiently profitable, he spent the rest of his life trying to cheat people out of their money, always one step ahead of any retribution (it’s suggested in reporting when his wife died that he had left Galesburg to escape some heat from local reporters over yet another scam).
Keith O’Brien says in a footnote in Paradise Falls that he has, for the first time, told the story of William T. Love. I think he comes closer than others had before, but I don’t think anyone had actually put together the full narrative of his life. So, now you have it.
The Huckster—maybe especially in actual con artist form—is America’s one true folk hero. You can see shades of it in discussions about Love, most of which focused on Lomax and didn’t connect him to Model City, South Huron, Guthrie, or anywhere else. He’s a cheat, sure, but invariably described more like a troublesome scamp: exuding passion, charismatic—sometimes like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, even. He bridges the eras of Soapy Smith and John R. Brinkley, and he had the good fortune to have his misdeeds overshadowed by the even darker ones of Hooker Chemical and Standard Oil.
But one thing does bear stressing:
Model City did not fail because of the Panic of 1893 or because of environmental concerns around diverting the Niagara River. It definitely did not fail because Nikola Tesla invented alternating current and obviated the need for a hydro power station. Model City failed because there was no Model City, like there was no South Huron, like there was no Rileyville, no Lomax, and no New City, Delaware. William T. Love was not a utopianist who would’ve done the right thing if he only had the chance. He had plenty of chances, and he never seems to have done anything but take the money and run.
Model City failed because William Thomasson Love was a liar, a thief, and a fraud—so insubstantial that there doesn’t seem to have been anyone around to bury him or remark on his passing. His legacy, and his monument, is the country’s first Superfund site.
Which, you know, is just about right.
References:
- Germain, David. “Mr. Love and his canal.” Associated Press. 27 May, 1993.
- “Big Crowd Present for First Land Filing.” The Daily Plainsman. Huron, South Dakota. 28 June, 1955. p.95.
- “Relates History of South Huron.” The Daily Plainsman. Huron, SD. 13 April 1937. p.6.
- “South Huron” advertisement. The Daily Plainsman. Huron, SD. 5 June 1890. p.4.
- O’Brien, Keith. Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe. Pantheon Books, 2022. p.29.
- “Love Sails Away.” The Buffalo News. Buffalo, NY. 19 April 1897. p.3
- “The Northland.” The Douglas Island News. Douglas, AK. 21 October, 1903. p.1
- "Tacomans Caught in Big Boom City?" The Tacoma Daily Ledger. Tacoma, WA. 23 November 1913. p.21.
- “Bonds at 50c. on the Dollar: A 14% Investment Ready for Anyone Who Will Merely Reach Out and Grab It.” The Financial World. 31 May, 1913. p.14.
- “Boom Bubble Burst: New Lomax City Advertised To be Started On Farm Land, May Now Revert To The Farmer of Whom It Was Acquired.” The True Republican. Sycamore, IL. 7 October, 1914. p.8
- “The Campaign in the United States.” Garden Cities & Town Planning, Vol.3. 1913. p.67
- “Garden City Movement: Hearing Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, Sixty-Fourth Congress.” available online here
- “Asks For Aid to Found New World for Farmers.” Associated Press. 27 May, 1927.
- “W.T. Love Says His New City Plan Is No Dream.” The Evening Journal. Wilmington, DE. 17 March, 1930. p.8
- Caldwell, William. “Simeon Stylites.” The Record. Hackensack, NJ. 9 September, 1931. p. 24
- “Love is Boosting His Second City: Oil Receiving Hamlet Will be Thriving Metropolis, Is His Latest Dream.” The Daily Gate City. Keokuk, Iowa. 15 September, 1914. p.5
- “Husband of Dead Woman is Located.” Dixon Evening Telegraph via the Associated Press. Dixon, IL. 11 December, 1928. p.2