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by Jim Mollenkopf

Much of what is now northwest Ohio was once covered by a vast, luxuriant and slumbering marsh, the remnants of a glacial lake that covered the area at one time. As the millennia passed, it lay virtually undisturbed, known only to the wildlife that lived in it and the aboriginal peoples who occasionally hunted it. When the 1800’s dawned, it was still a pristine wilderness, an untamed place incompatible with human existence.

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 forests, cathedralesque stands of oak, sycamore, elm and hickory trees that soared skyward and blocked out the sun. Still other parts of it were low, thick brush and wild growth, impenetrable to the traveler. Its thousands of square acres lay in a rectangular shaped plain, roughly 40 miles wide and 120 miles long, spreading over all or parts of 12 counties. It stretched east to west from Fremont, Ohio to near Fort Wayne, Indiana and north to south from the Maumee River valley to near Findlay, Ohio.

Despite its raw beauty the marsh 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 late summer and lasted well into fall, all frozen into an icy and 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 terrour, 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 along riverbanks or on sand ridges, remained in nearly its original 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 a 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 as there were dreams to be chased and land to be had, even if that land lay under the water much of the year.

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, oftentimes to someone else’s property which led to more than a few lively exchanges. Over time it was 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 around 1860 it was discovered 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 draining of individual properties, combined with more sophisticated state and county ditching projects, continued and by 1900, little evidence remained of the sweeping 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 only original portions of the Great Black Swamp that remain today are a few stands of old growth woods and 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 such as Magee Marsh Wildlife Area and the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge.  The rest of what was the Swamp consists of 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 in Black Swamp farm fields after a heavy rain recalls, if only on a small scale, the great marsh that’s now part of northwestern Ohio lore.

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