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The
Great Black Swamp by Carolyn V. Platt [from “TIMELlNE” - a publication of the Ohio
Historical Society - February-March 1987] [Printed in the April & July 1987 issues
of “The Towpath” by Editor Janet
Fledderjohn] wwwww Drowned worms always showed
up in the
Bowling Green, Ohio, city park after heavy rains. Their pale bodies strewed
the sticky surface of grayish-brown mud where children tried to play without
miring their shoes. Pools of tepid water stood about under the dark trees,
trapped by the land's flatness and the layer of watertight clay just beneath
its surface. The same damp scene often faced us when my father drove the
family farther afield to Mary Jane Thurstin Park twenty miles north on the
Maumee River. A sizable ditch
flowed beside each county road, spiked with cattails and gaudy in late June
with orange ditchbank lilies. In spring we scooped tadpoles into glass jars
from roadsides close to home. It was years before I discovered that roads
didn't always mean ditches as well. In the banks of many, you could see the
round pink clay tile that dripped water from the level black fields into the
area drainage system, and sometimes heaps of tile where a farmer planned to
improve the fields' under-draining. Once in a while, the car's nose would
lift slightly, and we would slide over a mighty ridge, perhaps ten feet
higher than the flat, flat countryside. On plowed land, the slight rise would
look sandy yellow rather than the dark, loamy brown that stretched around it
to the horizon. My sister and I
would remember with pleasurable shivers that we lived in the middle of what
had once been the legendary Great Black Swamp of northwestern Ohio. As we
rode, we tried to imagine that the small wood lots dotting the fields were
spreading to cover the corn and soybeans, blotting out the midsummer sun, and
surrounding us with mysterious gloom. There wasn't much for the imagination
to work with, though; the great swamp has faded with fewer traces than almost
any other part of Ohio's wilderness.
2-87 + 3-87
2-87 + 3-87 These were the
factors that formed the big morass: a slope toward the northeast of only
about four feet each mile, fine blue clay subsoil that cupped water, and low
beach ridges that ran across the direction of drainage. For awhile, the area
must have been a vast cattail marsh, busy with waterfowl, but natural plant
succession gradually formed a thick swamp forest. Ancient elm and ash trees
grew with their roots in the standing waters, with massive oaks and hickories
on the sandy beach ridges. Windfalls, especially the tumbled trees uprooted
by occasional tornadoes, together with the deep, heavy mud, made the region
almost impassable. No one knows the origin of the name "Black Swamp”.
Nineteenth-century land speculators claimed that it referred to the rich
black soil, but it seems just as likely that early travelers were thinking
about the forest's gloom and its feeling of ominous remoteness. Northwestern
Ohio remained Indian territory later than most areas of the state, and
important Ottawa villages dotted the Maumee Valley until the end of the
eighteenth century. In 1794 Anthony Wayne marveled at "the very
extensive and highly cultivated fields" that lay at the present site of
Defiance, where the Auglaize enters the Maumee. The first decades of the
nineteenth century saw the tribes ceding more and more of their lands through
a series of treaties. Gradually, removed even from their reservations, the Indian
exodus left the territory open to white penetration. But settlement had scarcely touched the land by 1820. Settlers
numbered 1,781 that year in the first federal census to include northwestern
Ohio. One reason for the delay in taking up the land was the letters and
journals of less-than-enchanted soldiers fighting in the War of 1812. Robert
Lucas, probably the first to write about the Black Swamp by that name,
reported in his journal: "Started from the foot of the Rapids [Maumee]
to meet the army, proceeded through the wilderness towards Urbana, traveled
about 25 miles - a very rainy day, and then encamped in what is called the
Black Swamp, had a disagreeable night of wet and “Musketoes”. Others
complained bitterly of mud that reached their horses’ saddle skirts and that
oozed ankle-deep in their tents at night. Both
transportation problems and the financial panics of 1819 and 1837 caused
settlement to lag after the war. In an attempt to retain control of Detroit,
General William Hull's army had marched there from Urbana, Ohio in 1812,
building Hull's Trace directly south to north through the heart of the swamp
in Wood County. But that was merely a sodden wagon track. Another route was
badly needed to cut through the swamp that blocked travel between the Western
Reserve and the growing settlements in southeastern Michigan. In 1823
Congress authorized the Maumee and Western Reserve Road from Sandusky to the
Maumee Rapids (now the site of Maumee, southwest of Toledo). Completed in
1827, the route soon became notorious as "perhaps the worst road on the
continent”, according to the History of Sandusky County. Many travelers
preferred to brave Lake Erie squalls by boat or to travel overland through
Ontario to reach Detroit. A tavern stood at every mile on the road between
Fremont and Maumee to offer mired travelers lodging and other solace.
Settlers made cash by pulling stalled teams out of mudholes. During the
1830s, settlement stepped up, especially near present-day Maumee, Perrysburg,
and Fremont. In 1832 a brave or foolhardy family even settled in the depths
of the swamp on the site of Bowling Green itself. Yet huge tracts remained
nearly empty, especially in Ottawa, Wood, Henry, Putnam, and Paulding
counties. Transportation improved during the 1840s when both the Miami and
Erie and the Wabash and Erie canals opened along the Maumee and Auglaize
Rivers, but holding of land by the government and by land speculators
restrained settlement. So did new reports of disease among the canal-building
crews - typhoid, pneumonia, cholera, and especially malaria, usually called
“ague” or "the shakes." A Wood County
doctor reminisced about his early Black Swamp years in 1897: "Whenever a
new family made their appearance and settled down, we would all say, ‘There
is another family with whom we can divide the shakes.’ It took from three to five years to get
acclimated. The day the chill was to come on you could look out from 10 A.M. until 2 P.M. and you could see the boys
come in to take their shake, as much so as to take their dinners. We had no
need of a doctor to bleed the patient, for the pesky mosquitoes did all the
bleeding that was necessary." A poem published in an 1837 edition of the
Maumee City Express
commented: There's a funeral every
day, without a hearse or pall; They tuck them in the
ground with breeches, coat and
all. Such reports
must have discouraged the more cautious from settling in such an unwholesome
region. Malaria disappeared only during the second half of the century,
probably not because the swamps were drained - area residents know that there
are still plenty of "pesky mosquitoes”, but through use of screens and
medication that destroyed the disease's reservoir in humans. Cholera and
milk sickness were major problems as well. After a particularly devastating
cholera epidemic in 1854, unfavorable publicity disturbed residents so much
that they resolved at a meeting to change area place names. The village of
Gilead was renamed Grand Rapids, the only new name that stuck. Attempts to
change the Maumee River to Grand Rapids River and the town of Maumee to South
Toledo failed. Milk from cows that ate poisonous white snakeroot caused milk
sickness, prevalent in the 1840s and 1850s. It often killed, especially
children. Railroads and
drainage ditches were the real keys to the magical transformation of early
travelers' "frightful swamp" into today's neatly cultivated fields
of corn, wheat, and soybeans. Developing the two proceeded hand-in-hand.
Railroads arrived close on the heels of the canal gangs. The flat topography
of northwest Ohio was no challenge for railroad construction, and by 1860
several important lines radiated from Toledo, and others fringed the area. By
1886 they webbed thickly over the whole region. Not only did these iron roads surpass the canal’s ability to link farmers with markets, they also created an insatiable demand for wood - wood for the engines and for railroad ties as well. Much white oak also went to make rot-resistant masts and planking for Great Lakes ships and docks. While earlier settlers elsewhere had often simply cut and burned their timber, Black Swamp farmers sold theirs for extra cash. They gained both cleared fields and the ready cash to drain the rich soil at the same time. Professional lumbermen moved in as well, bringing logging crews from Canada: Eber Brock Ward built Ward's Canal at the swamp's northeastern edge to float logs into Lake Erie. He cleared a large area in the 1860s, and by 1869 seven sawmills operated near the village of Bono. Individual
farmers had plowed drainage furrows for some years, but demands soon arose
for systematic area drainage systems. By 1850 a small enclave of settlers
from Holland established farms on either side of the Miami and Erie Canal in
the southwest corner of Putnam County, where their experience with the Dutch
lowlands may have provided some technical advice for these early drainage
efforts. An 1859 state law authorized digging of public ditches, and heavy
farm taxes were levied to provide funds. Between 1859 and 1886, draining transformed
the entire area. The biggest project, called the Jackson Cut-off, was dug in
1878-1879, diverting the Portage River's headwaters into Beaver Creek and the
Maumee River. The nine-mile ditch still drains parts of Wood, Henry, Putnam,
and Hancock counties. Farmers also began to bury inverted wooden troughs and
then clay tile to under-drain the fields, and by 1880 more than fifty tile
factories used the region's plentiful clay to supply them. Free of standing
water, the heavy black loam proved incredibly productive. By the 1880s the
rich, flat northwestern Ohio cornfields and wood lots looked much as they do
today - though woodcutting still goes on at a rather alarming pace. At
present rates of cutting, experts estimate the lots will disappear by about the year
2030. The enormous
water-lands of the Great Black Swamp may have been settled later than other
areas of the state, but they disappeared faster and with fewer traces than almost
any other ecosystem in Ohio. They passed before anybody systematically
studied their trees and plants, their animals, or their bird life. Because of
this, anyone who tries to reconstruct a picture of the area's natural history
engages in a fair amount of guesswork. Certainly, the area's ecology was
nothing like the scene that my mother, sister and I took for granted in the
1950s when we looked for ring-necked pheasants and cottontails along the scrubby
fencerows, and if lucky, might find a clutch of quail eggs nestled in the
tall grasses. The area's
original trees formed a splendid deciduous swamp forest, whose diversity far
surpassed that of beech-maple or oak-hickory associations. Small drainage
differences produced this great variety of trees, which grew tall and
small-crowned as they competed for sun in the canopy. Elm, black ash, sour
gum, and silver or red maple shared the wettest spots with pin oak, swamp
white oak, and sycamore. White ash, buckeye, shell bark hickory, honey
locust, black cherry, and red and yellow oak claimed slightly better-drained
land, threaded by enormous tangles of grapevine and poison ivy. There were no
conifers. On the drier sandy ridges grew beech-maple or oak-hickory forests.
Yet there were spots too wet for even the water-rooted elms and ashes,
especially in Wood and Sandusky counties. Here, where water stood two or
three feet deep, the dark shade opened into prairies where dragonflies
hovered in the hot sunlight among waving eight-foot grasses and tall, showy
flowers of yellow, purple, and white. Few animals or
birds lived in the swamp forest - the case in most climax forest communities.
Wood frogs probably called in the early spring pools, and a few kinds of salamanders
sheltered under damp logs. More varied amphibians and reptiles populated the
prairie openings. A county history tells the intriguing story of a boy bitten
by a "black viper”, almost certainly a massasauga or swamp rattler. An
Indian approached the failing boy's doctor and offered to cure the young man
for a jug of whiskey. When the patient quickly recovered, the doctor offered
his colleague three more jugs for the secret remedy. Though the Indian
agreed, there are no further references to the miracle cure. It must be said
that bites from these small rattlers almost never kill, except, perhaps, the
very young or feeble. Possibly the native doctor knew that. Bird life was
limited as well. Barred and great horned owls probably broke the dusky stillness
with their startling hoots, mutters, and shrieks. Woodpeckers' drumming must
have sounded often; downy, hairy, red-bellied, and big pileated woodpeckers
scoured the mature forest's dead trees for insects, grubs, and eggs. Wild
turkeys, long ago hunted out, lived under the trees, and possibly some ruffed
grouse. Passenger pigeons may have roosted in the trees, though they
preferred beechmaple forests for feeding on their favorite beechnuts.
Woodland songbirds like red-eyed vireos, scarlet tanagers, flycatchers,
redstarts, and exquisite blue cerulean warblers added notes of song and color
to the dim green background. Because the swamp died so quickly, we lack records of changes in small mammal populations, though it seems clear that open country species like deer mice, red foxes, and fox squirrels largely replaced their woodland counterparts, white-footed mice, gray foxes, and gray squirrels. (But gray squirrels still seem to dominate the Bowling Green parks and shade trees.) Brown rats and mice moved into barns and corncribs. The demise of game birds and large mammals is better documented. Many of them took refuge in the as yet un-drained swamp forest of northwestern Ohio, making the swamp, which had been poor in animal life, a paradise for hunters during the mid-nineteenth century. Hunting parties gathered there each year from more settled parts of the state, but woodcutting and hunting soon eliminated most game species. The figures
are eloquent: while a local newspaper reported that one hunting group alone
shipped out about 350 deer carcasses in 1869, the last deer were killed only
twenty years later. (Hunting completely wiped out deer state-wide, but they
were reintroduced early in this century. Now they are common, even in the
heavily farmed Black Swamp counties.) Bison and elk, never abundant in the
area, vanished by the early years of the nineteenth century. Beaver abandoned
the Maumee Valley by 1837. River otters dwindled throughout the century, and
the last pair of cougars was killed in 1845, while lynxes and wolverines were
gone by roughly the same date. Bobcats, however, were reported as being
common as late as 1878. Gray wolves and bears were probably very rare by the
1860s. At least one Wood County pioneer paid for his land by hunting wolves
for bounties: John Carter garnered $4.25 for grown wolves' scalps and $2.50
for those of cubs. An 1843 newspaper clipping states that he collected more
than a fourth of all the wolf bounties paid that year in Wood County. Wild turkeys
seem to have hung on until nearly the end of the century, at least in the
less settled areas of the Oak Openings west of Toledo, and passenger pigeons,
the most numerous bird of the century's first half, were hunted out by 1900.
Ruffed grouse and prairie chickens, birds of the more open areas, faded at
about the same time. Some of the saddest casualties of settlement were the
immense spawning grounds on the Black Swamp tributaries for lake sturgeon,
Great Lakes muskellunge, and northern pike. Milldams blocked the fishes'
spawning runs upstream from Lake Erie, silt covered their eggs and destroyed
aquatic vegetation, and falling oxygen levels killed off the hordes of
mayflies and other Great Lakes fish foods. A foot of good topsoil has washed
into the streams from the naked earth between the rows of corn on the cleared
land. The area now supports those small birds and mammals of the open country that thrive close to human settlements. Many of these moved in only after the swamp's clearing and draining. Small birds became much more common than they were in the old swamp forests. Brown headed cowbirds, bobolinks, and horned larks moved in from the western grasslands, and savannah sparrows from the North. Vesper sparrows, song sparrows, dickcissels, and eastern meadowlarks appeared as well. Common crows and red-headed woodpeckers replaced their deep-woods counterparts - the common raven and pileated woodpecker. Yellow-throated,
cerulean, and golden-winged warblers declined or disappeared, to be replaced
by the much-loved bluebirds, cardinals, and tufted titmice that moved in from
the South. Robins became more common. A game bird of the open country, the
ring-necked pheasant, was successfully introduced beginning in 1902. Barn
swallows, purple martins, chimney swifts, and eastern phoebes began nesting
in barns, martin houses, chimneys, and bridge structures - all provided by
humans. Starlings and house sparrows, unwisely introduced in the nineteenth
century, proliferated. But small
birds' numbers have fluctuated greatly over the past century: bobolinks,
dickcissels, meadowlarks, red-headed woodpeckers, bluebirds, and ring-necked
pheasants are far more rare than they were fifty years ago, because wooden
fence posts were replaced first with concrete and then metal ones and because
new, intensive farming methods eliminated fencerows altogether, leaving
little cover at field edges. Forty years ago, flocks of fifty pheasants were
common, and high schools regularly recessed the first day of pheasant hunting
season. Now one is lucky to see two or three of these birds in a summer. CAPTIONS FROM PICTURES The heavy cover of massive trees and the black mud below them may have
been responsible for the region's name of Black Swamp. Mud and the
wind-felled logs that littered it made travel through the swamp extremely
difficult. General "Mad Anthony" Wayne's 1794 victory over the
Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers took its name from a tangled area
created by a tornado. The swamp was a
major barrier to settlement during the next half-century. Enormous oaks dominated the drier parts of the swamp. Bur oaks were
especially adaptable because, unlike many trees, their roots could tolerate
water soaking. Thanks to the Goll family, who loved their trees too much to
sell them, one nearly virgin stand of swamp forest remains in northwestern
Ohio at Goll Woods State Nature Preserve. Only a few trees have been cut from
the tract, first during World War I, when lumber was needed for the war
effort, and more recently, when Dutch elm disease killed American elms. Young American elms still growing with their roots in standing water
at Ottawa National Wildlife Area in Lucas County are perhaps the best
remaining example of swamp forest. Because the area is diked to maintain
water levels for the Lake Erie marshes' waterfowl, standing water still
creates conditions similar to those in the old swamp. Even the fine tract of
forest at Goll Woods State Nature Preserve in Fulton County lacks standing
water because surrounding farmlands have been drained. Miterwort grows
in May against the trunk of a more than 400-year-old oak at Goll Woods.
Indians and settlers alike have passed close to its trunk, and gray wolves
have howled beneath its branches. In spring, sheets of delicate flowers bloom
under the venerable trees. Blue violets and
jewelweed are still common plants throughout Ohio's moister areas. While
violets bloom in May, jewelweed blossoms orange or yellow in late summer.
Juice from its leaves can soothe the itches of mosquito bites and poison ivy.
Children also call jewelweed "touch-me-not," since its ripe seed
pods explode at the touch of a finger. Wood frogs
must have bred widely in the Black Swamp's vernal pools. Few other animals,
however, lived in the mature swamp forest. More varied animals and birds
inhabited the wet prairie openings and the less dense oak habitat that formed
on the area's sandy beach ridges. The heavy clay
soils that held captive the surface waters of the Black Swamp also furnished
the means by which they could be drained away. Clay suitable for drain tile
manufacture was abundant and rarely more than a foot or two beneath the
surface. About 1880 there were eleven tile factories operating in Putnam
County alone. In the last
decade of the nineteenth century a wood-fired kiln was turning out drainage
tile at Grove Hill in Paulding County. Paulding's settlement was retarded
both by natural conditions and by the ownership of much of its land by
speculators anticipating the construction of railroads. Dancing swarms
of crane flies shimmer above the Black Swamp's woodland pools. Though the
two-winged flies look like large mosquitoes, they do not bite. Swarms of
voracious mosquitoes, however, were one of the Great Black Swamp's major
hazards. Mosquito-carried malaria, or "the shakes" was common in northwestern
Ohio until well into the nineteenth century. In season, the disease would lay
farmers low for as many as two days a week. Black Swamp
hardwoods were an important source of income for land-clearing farmers, and
furnished the raw materials for local enterprises. Sawmills such
as the Huron County plant followed the retreating forest westward across the
Black Swamp counties. Their machinery was readily portable, and the
ramshackle structures that housed it could be dismantled or abandoned when
the local supply of timber was exhausted. Until the
mid-1880s iron furnaces at Cecil and Antwerp created a demand for charcoal.
When they closed, local timber production was still sufficient to supply raw
materials for fifteen stave mills in Paulding County. Sodden fields would be the scene of much back-breaking labor for man
and beast before they could be brought under cultivation. Timbering off was
but the first step; the grubbing of stumps and cutting of ditches might be
the work of several seasons. By 1910,
the Black Swamp region was on its way to being the most intensively cropped
area of Ohio. At the eastern extremity of the Corn Belt, the formerly
inundated lands led the rest of the state in the production of cash grain
crops. Threshing scenes were typical of the thousands of farms that had
displaced the soggy primeval landscape. The Great Black Swamp
is today little more than the dark ghost of a bygone habitat. Almost nowhere,
except at Goll Woods State Nature Preserve in Fulton County, portions of
Ottawa National Wildlife Area in Lucas County, and a few other scattered wood
lots, can one find examples of the primeval swamp forest. And yet, it's hard
to mourn wholeheartedly the passing of that dark, old morass, mud-banks
steaming with humidity in the summer heat, malaria "Musketoes"
whining dismally in the car, poison ivy matting the spaces between trees.
Dreaming about the dark past was better than living it for two young girls of
the 1950s; gathering red-orange bittersweet and wild grapes along the
barbed-wire fences in autumn was more fun than listening to the shrieks of
owls or wolves during the long nineteenth-century nights would have been. The
memory of driving past billows of maturing corn and massive red barns (Red
Man Tobacco; Chew Mail Pouch - Treat Yourself to the Best) now evokes as much
nostalgia as that childhood vision of an unspoiled wilderness. How can we
balance wanting wilderness - beautiful, compelling, but often hostile to us -
with our need for security, comfort, and human prosperity? Few of us today
would want to live in the Great Black Swamp’s shadow, but its memory and the
sparse remnants that remain enrich our increasingly tamed landscape. |