Great Black Swamp
The Great Black Swamp was a swamp located in northwest Ohio and Indiana , United States . It extended in the catchment area of the Maumee River from Lake Erie to Fort Wayne in Indiana and was about 190 kilometers long (east-west direction) and about 65 kilometers wide (north-south direction). The swamp covered all or part of the surface of twelve counties in Ohio.
The swamp was created as a result of the glacier movements during the last ice age . The landscape was characterized by dense forests. Oaks , plane trees , hickories , walnuts , ash trees , elms , maples and poplars grew in stagnant water, which usually did not dry out even in summer. There were no Native American settlements in the Great Black Swamp, and the area was virtually impassable even to the first white settlers. Farmers who settled on the edge of the swamp had to struggle with cholera , typhus and especially with malaria , which was known as ague . It was so common that it became common to put quinine powder on the table next to salt and pepper .
Compared to other parts of the country, the Great Black Swamp delayed colonization of northwest Ohio by several decades. The first barge dam from Fremont to Perrysburg , the Maumee and Western Reserve Road , was laid in the 1820s, but even on this route the travel speed averaged one mile a day. In the 1850s, large-scale drainage measures began with government support , which lasted around 40 years. As a result of the drainage, today's highly fertile farmland of northwest Ohio was created. The Great Black Swamp has disappeared except for tiny remains.
literature
- Homer C. Sampson: Succession in the swamp forest formation in northern Ohio . In: The Ohio journal of science 30, 1930, ISSN 0030-0950 , pp. 340–357, online (PDF; 1.29 MB) .
- Martin R. Kaatz: The Black Swamp. A Study in Historical Geography . In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers 45, 1955, 1, ISSN 0004-5608 , pp. 1-35.