"It took some time to get here, but taking Carpentersville Dam out will be a huge benefit for both recreation and for conservation." That's what Forest Preserve District of Kane County Executive Director Benjamin Haberthur said back in the summer of 2024, right before crews started pulling apart a 380-foot concrete structure that had sat across the Fox River since the 1830s. The dam came out that fall. The time-lapse footage the Forest Preserve District posted online runs through November 13, 2024, the day the last of it was gone.
Two years later, most people driving Main Street or dropping their kids at Fox River Shores Forest Preserve probably think of that as old news. A construction project that wrapped up before the last two winters. But the river hasn't stopped moving since then, and neither has the piece of Carpentersville built around it. What changed isn't just that a dam disappeared. It's that a short, unglamorous stretch of the Fox River became the county's longest run of open water, grew a brand-new annual event with a name most people outside Dundee Township have never heard, and is still generating paperwork and repair bills nobody budgeted for a decade ago.
What 380 Feet of Concrete Was Actually Blocking
The Carpentersville Dam was a low-head, run-of-the-river structure, the kind engineers describe as broad-crested with a sloping face, roughly 9 feet high and 380 feet across. It sat just upstream of Main Street inside Fox River Shores Forest Preserve, which the Forest Preserve District owns along with nearly all of the shoreline for 2.5 miles above it.
Before removal, anyone putting a kayak in at Buffalo Park Forest Preserve in Algonquin could paddle about 2.8 miles before hitting the dam and having to haul their boat around it. That's not a long float. It's barely enough time to get the paddle rhythm settled.
After the removal, that same put-in connects to 10.2 miles of uninterrupted river running all the way to Elgin, according to the engineering firm that carried out the project. No portage, no dragging a canoe over rocks, no dam to route around. It's the longest stretch of unbroken flow on the Fox River in Kane County, and Carpentersville sits in the middle of it rather than at the edge.
The Preserve Looks Different Than the Postcard Version Downstream
If your mental image of a Fox River walk is Batavia's riverwalk, with its footbridges and restored mill buildings, Fox River Shores doesn't match it, and that's kind of the point now. Since the dam came out, outdoor writers covering the Fox have started describing this particular stretch as the wilder cousin of the more manicured river paths further south. The trails here move through open floodplain meadows, river bluffs, and dense riparian woodland rather than landscaped park frontage. The main entrance sits at 716 Williams Road in Carpentersville, with parking and direct access to the riverside trail network.
That distinction matters for anyone who's walked the preserve regularly for years. The shoreline the dam used to hold back at a constant pool level now rises and falls with actual river conditions. It's a different kind of walk than it was in 2023, even if the trailhead and parking lot haven't moved an inch.
The Docks Are Only There Half the Year
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only visit the preserve once a season. Kane County installed new Universal Design paddling docks at five access points along the newly freed stretch of river, including one at Carpentersville's Riverfront Park, with matching docks at East Dundee's Bartels Park, South Elgin's SEBA Park, Batavia, and Montgomery. The project was funded through the American Rescue Plan and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Those docks aren't permanent fixtures. They come out every winter and go back in every spring, which means the put-in experience at Riverfront Park literally changes shape twice a year. Late September, when the weather is still good for a paddle but the pull-out season is approaching, is close to the last reliable window before the docks disappear for the winter. If you've been meaning to try the river since the dam came out, this is closer to the end of that window than the beginning.
A New Local Tradition With an Old Local Joke in Its Name
The most visible sign that this stretch of river has become something people organize their calendars around is El Cardunal, a paddle event that didn't exist before the dam removal made it possible. Friends of the Fox River and the Fabulous Fox! Water Trail launched the inaugural version on June 22, 2025: a 5.9-mile paddle from Cornish Park in Algonquin to Bartels Park in East Dundee, with no portages required for the first time in the event's brief history. Around 50 rental kayaks and canoes were available at a discount, shuttle buses handled the logistics of getting people back to their cars, and paddlers could stop for educational breaks at Fox River Shores Forest Preserve and the old dam site itself.
The name isn't a coincidence or a marketing invention. It comes from the old Dundee Community High School district, which once drew students from Carpentersville, East Dundee, West Dundee, and Algonquin, giving rise to the nickname "Cardunals," Car-Dun-Al, with a cardinal as the mascot. Dundee Middle School still uses the name today, and a handful of local businesses have kept it alive as well. Friends of the Fox River borrowed that history for a paddle route that runs through exactly the same four communities.
The event returned for a second year on June 20, 2026, following the same route. Two Junes in, it's no longer a one-off celebration marking a finished construction project. It's turned into the kind of thing that shows up on a paddling calendar every summer, which is a different kind of proof that the dam removal changed daily life here, not just the river's hydrology.
The Bill That's Still Coming Due
None of this arrived free of complications. Removing the dam exposed water and sewer lines that had been buried beneath the impoundment for decades, and reporting from Shaw Local in June 2025 put the cost of reburying those lines at more than $3 million for the village. That's not a small number for a project that most residents assumed had already been paid for and closed out back in 2024.
The same stretch of river picked up a different kind of recognition around the same time. Kane County's Longmeadow Parkway Bridge Corridor, which crosses the Fox near Carpentersville, received a national Engineering Excellence Award from the American Council of Engineering Companies at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., according to Shaw Local's reporting in January 2026. It's a separate project from the dam removal, a new road bridge rather than a river restoration, but it's more evidence that this particular short run of the Fox has had an unusually active two years for infrastructure, recreation, and cost overruns all at once.
None of that is unusual for river restoration projects generally. It is unusual to have that much activity concentrated on a stretch you might drive past twice a day without a second look.
What This Adds Up To
The dam coming out in 2024 was the headline. The two years since have been the quieter, more interesting story: a preserve that reads wilder than it used to, docks that vanish and reappear on a seasonal clock, an annual paddle event with two editions under its belt and a name borrowed from a defunct high school district, and a village still writing checks for pipes nobody saw coming. If you've lived near Fox River Shores the whole time and still think of the dam removal as something that already happened and is now finished, it might be worth one more walk down to Riverfront Park before the docks come out for the season.
Zamudio Realty Group pays close attention to changes like this because they shape what it actually feels like to live along the Fox River corridor, long before any of it shows up in a listing photo. If you're curious what a home near this stretch of the river is worth today, Zamudio Realty Group offers a free home valuation whenever you're ready to look.
