By: Melinda Krick, Paulding County Bicentennial Committee
Part of a series
PAULDING – When today’s residents look back on our 200 years of history and think about what it took to clear and drain the Great Black Swamp, few may realize the struggle to drain the swamp continues to this day. As long as people want to live here and farm here, keeping the mud and water at bay will be a ceaseless effort.
The Black Swamp – 1,500 square miles water and mud beneath a dense forest – had acquired a menacing reputation and most settlers heading into the Midwest wanted to avoid the mud and disease at all costs. While other areas, such as southeastern Michigan, were attracting a flood of new residents, the Black Swamp counties grew very slowly. Draining the deep, sluggish water from the flat landscape would become the key to finally settling the region.
Our earliest settlers came from other areas of Ohio, from other states, or from Europe, which typically had hillier terrain. They didn’t have experience in artificial drainage. Here, they initially chose land with natural drainage, such as ridges and the high banks along streams and rivers. Populations remained low, even after the Wabash & Erie and Miami & Erie canals opened in the 1840s.
The first families of Paulding County first had to clear trees to build a cabin and shelter for their livestock. As they began to clear away more forest and plant crops, they started creating furrows and digging ditches to drain their farms. These were individual efforts and had mixed results. Sometimes farmers only succeeded in diverting the water onto their neighbors’ land.
Starting in the late 1840s, the State of Ohio attempted to bring about a more systematic effort to allow entire areas to to be drained. The state’s first general drainage law, passed in 1847, allowed one or more landowners to petition the county commissioners for a ditch.
This law was superseded by the 1859 ditch law, “an Act to provide for locating, establishing and constructing ditches, drains and water courses.” The laws have been updated and modified several times. The cost of the improvement was shared proportionally among those who benefitted.
Getting rid of the wet conditions had another important benefit.
The clouds of mosquitoes inhabiting the swamp carried what we know today as malaria, but the pioneers called the illness “ague” or “marsh fever.” Some estimates say as many as five out of six settlers were affected; they regularly suffered with severe chills and shaking, fever and profuse sweating. In some cases, people couldn’t work for several years. Sometimes the disease was fatal.
Residents and travelers also were fearful of cholera, which can be transmitted through contaminated water. The fast-moving disease could wipe out families within hours and cause others to flee and not return. Cholera pandemics struck Ohio, including the Black Swamp, numerous times in the mid-1800s. Epidemics of typhoid fever and yellow fever also occurred.
Despite the obvious benefits of a united effort to fight the swamp, ditching met with some resistance. The taxes assessed for the projects often cost more than the land’s purchase price. Some owners couldn’t pay their taxes. Nevertheless, notices for petition ditches began to appear.
Soon, surveyors were laying out open ditches, often between section lines. Men would come in and clear the timber and underbrush, followed by a horse-drawn plow to break the ground and scrapers pulled by horses to remove the dirt. After the process was repeated a few times, the men would finish the job, digging and grading by hand.
The ditches ranged from 3-6 feet deep and up to 20 feet wide at the top and 6-7 feet wide at the bottom. They served to artificially lower the water table of the surrounding land.
The dirt removed from new ditches at the same time was used to create new road beds. All over the area, roads paralleled the ditches in a grid pattern.
It quickly became obvious that surface drainage wasn’t enough to dry out the land and produce good harvests. Farmers needed to add underdrainage – removing standing water and excess water from the soil through a system of underground drains. The practice was introduced to the U.S. from Britain in the 1820s. A good ditch system was necessary to provide outlets for the underground drainage.
At first, tile factories were scarce – the first in central Ohio started in the 1850s – and transporting the tile was too expensive. Even when tile mills began to appear, most farmers couldn’t afford the tile.
Farmers improvised using a couple of methods to install underdrains, using materials on hand.
One method was digging a trench and laying saplings or split rains end to end at one side, then covering them with lengths of sawn lumber, usually oak, elm, black ash or basswood, leaving an open channel between the sapling and edge of the plank. Sometimes two lines of saplings were used with the boards perched on top of both.
Less common was a “vault” style drain. A trench was dug then a narrower, deeper trench was created at the bottom, creating “shoulders” on which planks would rest. The lower trench would collect and carry away the water.
Both of these types might last eight to 15 years, depending on the soil type, quality of construction and how well they were maintained.
Next time: Part 2 of Ditches and Tile Mills.
More information on the bicentennial can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PauldingCounty200.
