03/01/2003

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Smart Stuff with Twig Walkingstick: Great Black Swamp (for the Week of March 9, 2003)

Writer:

Kurt Knebusch
knebusch.1@osu.edu
(330)263-3776

Dear Twig: What was the Great Black Swamp?

Imagine a swamp the size of Connecticut -- 40 miles wide and 120 miles long. Home of spiders and snakes, wolves and bears, ducks and turtles and crayfish and geese. A thick, wet, primeval jungle of tall trees and head-high grasses and marsh plants. Hard to walk through and easy to get lost in. Especially when mosquitoes cover you head to toe. They come in clouds and carry malaria.

That was the Great Black Swamp, a wet, wild wilderness that used to be in northwest Ohio. It oozed, sprawled and steamed from Toledo to Findlay, Sandusky to Fort Wayne, Indiana.

In the 1800s, settlers started draining the swamp. They succeeded. The land was dried, cleared and used to grow crops. Which is something it's good at because the soil is very rich. Today the land is fertile farmland -- among Ohio's best.

But a built-in, natural filter for Lake Erie was destroyed. The swamp cleaned mud from the Maumee River, Lake Erie's second-biggest tributary. The loss of this filter hurt the lake.

We gained, lost and learned from the Black Swamp's demise.

Sedimentally,

Twig

Hey, Editor! Information for this column came from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, http://midwest.fws.gov/ottawa/history.html, and Ohio Historical Society, http:/www.ohiohistorycentral.org/ohc/history/path/places/blkswmp.shtml.

"Smart Stuff with Twig Walkingstick," a service of The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, is a weekly science column for kids. Twig is a bow tie-wearing cartoon walkingstick, a type of insect. He's the voice of the column and appears at the left in the hard-copy version. Bob the Bug, Twig's pal, is a pensive bald-headed bug of an unidentified type who doesn't say much and appears in the bottom-right corner. For more information or to receive Twig by mail or e-mail, contact Kurt Knebusch, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691, (330) 263-3776, knebusch.1@osu.edu.