The Great Black Swamp

by Jim Mollenkopf

For thousands of years much of northwest Ohio lay covered by a vast, luxuriant swamp. According to early observers parts of it were watery meadows, veritable seas of living, moving green that would undulate beautifully in a summer breeze. Other parts of it were majestic and untouched forests, cathedralesque stands of oak, sycamore and hickory trees that soared skyward and blocked out the sun. Still other parts of it were thick, impenetrable brush and wild growth. Its thousands of square miles spread over all or parts of 12 counties stretching east to west from Sandusky, Ohio to near Fort Wayne, Indiana and north to south from the Maumee River valley to near Findlay, Ohio.

Despite its raw beauty the swamp held, for the most part, no allure for humans. Early westward settlers who traveled along its edges saw its rich, black soil, inky waters, and light-shuttering stands of trees and named it the Black Swamp and kept going. For the Swamp also featured waist-high waters in the spring, voracious clouds of mosquitoes and other biting insects in the summer, malarial fevers that started in summer and lasted well into fall, all frozen into an icy isolated wilderness in the winter. It was a foreboding-looking place to those seeking land to clear and farms to plant and most wanted nothing to do with it. One man who traveled through it in 1815 wrote to his wife, "my great terror, the Black Swamp, is passed."

But the land around and beyond the Swamp continued to be swallowed up by settlement and by around 1830 the majority of desirable ground east of the Mississippi had been taken. Pioneers then began to look to the Swamp which, except for a few hardy souls eking out a living and mostly along riverbanks or on sand ridges, remained in a near pristine state. As that decade went on more and more settlers entered the Swamp to stake their claim. Those early homesteaders paid a price.

What early roads were laid into the Swamp merely sank into the quagmire, especially in the spring. Settlers and their horses struggled mightily through the mud, in some cases making only a mile of progress a day. The mosquitoes were so bad in the warm months that heavy clothing had to be worn for protection which made the labor of clearing the trees and undergrowth even more sweltering. To keep the mosquitoes at bay at night settlers kept smudge pots in their cabins, sleeping like so many hams in a smokehouse. Late summer saw the onset of malarial illness called ague, which led to soaring fever, deep chills and violent shaking which went on for days or even weeks. It was not unusual for entire families to lay inside their cabins and shake uncontrollably.

The adverse conditions took their mental toll as well. According to legend one Wood County settler was murdered by his wife for refusing to take her out of the Swamp. And the brutal winter of 1842-43 broke the spirit of many homesteaders as spring revealed dozens of cabins left empty, their occupants having fled, their dead livestock lying about. But the settlers kept coming.

In addition to the various physical discomforts and afflictions, settlers faced the rather significant engineering challenge of draining their land. Early efforts were haphazard and crude and usually consisted of digging a ditch to drain surface water away. But it was soon realized that underdrainage to drain subsurface moisture would be necessary for farmland to achieve maximum output.

The first underdrains were crude, usually stones or saplings laid in a trench and covered over. These drains were gradually replaced by a longer-lasting technique of nailing two planks into a V and laying them inverted in a trench and covering them over. Clay tile, which was the best method of underdrainage, was not available locally and could only be freighted in at considerable expense. But it was discovered around 1860 that a tremendous bed of clay lay under the rich topsoil of the Swamp and by 1880, dozens of tile factories had sprung up in the Black Swamp counties.

The drainage of individual properties, combined with more sophisticated state and county ditching projects, continued and by 1900 little evidence remained of the vast and slumbering wetland that once covered much of northwest Ohio. Ironically it was the Swamp itself that provided the elements needed for its elimination; wood to make the early underdrains and later fuel to fire the tile kilns and the clay to make the tile itself.

The original portions of the Great Black Swamp that remain today are the marshes along the southwestern shore of Lake Erie between Toledo and Port Clinton, land that is now mostly in the domain of state and national wildlife refuges. The rest of it is an emerald quiltwork of productive farmland, dotted by small cities and towns.

Deep drainage ditches that line many roads in the Black Swamp counties, some big enough to swallow an automobile serve as a reminder of the effort it took to drain the Swamp. And while it may be forever gone, the standing water left after a heavy rain in Black Swamp farm fields recalls, if only on a small scale, the great swamp that's now part of northwestern Ohio lore.