Lost Ohio: More Travels Into Haunted Landscapes, Ghost Towns, and Forgotten Lives by Randy McNutt

Author:Randy McNutt [McNutt, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Adult, History
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2006-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

11

Travels in the Great Black Swamp

Nature took twenty-five thousand years to create the Great Black Swamp and man fifty years to strip it. The glacier did the heaviest work, grinding the earth like a bowling ball on an anthill. At Cleveland, the ice was eight thousand feet thick. Retreating fourteen thousand years ago, it dammed a poorly drained area on the eastern end of the Lake Erie basin to form one of nine ancient lakes, which eventually dried and left sand ridges in the clay soil the way ridges form on a beach. Along the newer Lake Erie, the lake plains evolved into a larger pear-shaped region in northwest Ohio, where black organic matter piled on glacial soil to nurture swampy forests for ten thousand years. It was the ultimate compost heap.

Swamp chestnuts produced millions of nuts that covered the water and ground and choked other young trees. In this dark, wet place, armies of spiny hellrats—flashing their snouts and sharp claws, they resembled weasels—probed the muck for nuts. Another nut-eating dinosaur, the American harrack, ate the nuts and the hellrats.

Centuries later, before the arrival of the white man, the Great Black Swamp remained untouched and covered by water nine months a year. Vegetation grew wildly, becoming by the 1700s the largest deciduous swamp forest in North America. Its soil was a black, oozing muck. An early observer described the swamp as thoroughly impregnated with lime, forming a tough, waxy mud that stuck to wagon wheels.

According to some estimates, the swamp measured 120 miles long and 40 miles wide. The worst part was an area as large as Connecticut, between the Maumee and the Auglaize rivers. It had a split personality; just when it appeared to be all wet, dark, and muddy, a prairie would pop up to tantalize visitors. Some scientists believe the swamp stretched from Lake Erie to New Haven, Indiana. Because nature doesn’t provide boundaries like fences, no one knows for certain where the swamp began and ended. Most people agree that it consisted of eight contiguous counties, including Lucas, Wood, Paulding, Hancock, Defiance, and Putnam. Neighboring counties were swampy enough for many people to consider them Black Swamp territory. They included parts of Van Wert, Seneca, Ottawa, Fulton, Sandusky, Erie, and Henry counties. (I call these places the swamp suburbs.)

Pioneers did not draw much distinction between areas inside and outside the swamp. By more liberal estimates, its mucky fingers extended as far south as Allen and Mercer counties, north to Williams and Lucas, east to Hardin, and west to Indiana. (An old surveyor’s wall map, which hangs in the study of the Sherman House in Lancaster, shows the Great Black Swamp covering Ohio’s entire northwest quarter, all the way to the Indiana border in the west and the Darke County line in the south.) “The perfect uniformity of the soil has given the forest a homogeneous character,” historian Henry Howe wrote of the swamp in the late 1800s. “The trees are all generally the same height,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.