Great Black Swamp

The Great Black Swamp was a swamp in northwestern 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 km long ( east-west direction) and about 65 kilometers wide ( north-south direction). The bottoms covered in whole or in part, the surface of twelve counties in Ohio.

The marsh was created as a result of glacier movements during the last ice age. The landscape was dominated by dense forests. Oak, sycamore, hickory, walnut, ash, elm, maples and poplars grew in standing water, which itself did not dry mostly in the summer. In the Great Black Swamp, there were no settlements of Native Americans, and for the first white settlers, the area was virtually impassable. Farmer, who settled on the edge of the swamp had to fight with cholera, typhoid and especially with malaria, ague under the name was known. She was so widespread that it became customary to make in addition to salt and pepper Chininpulver on the table.

Compared with other parts of the country, delayed the Great Black Swamp colonization Northwest Ohio by several decades. The first corduroy road from Fremont to Perrysburg, the Maumee and Western Reserve Road, was laid in the 1820s, but even in this way was the travel speed on average a mile a day. In the 1850s, began with government support large-scale drainage measures which dragged on for 40 years. As a result of drainage today's highly fertile farmland Northwest Ohio was created. The Great Black Swamp is gone down to tiny remnants.