On Saturday, August 2, 2014, the water supply for the city of Toledo, Ohio, was poisoned. Officials issued an unequivocal order to the half million residents connected to the municipal intake: Don’t drink, cook, or brush your teeth with the water. […] Stores ran out of bottled water, leaving residents to queue up at local fire stations […]. The culprit was a bright green plume of Microcystis, a cyanobacterium that thrives in warm water […]. In spring, rains wash a pulse of nutrients off the surrounding region’s fertilized farms and send it down the Maumee and Sandusky Rivers and into western Lake Erie. And in summer, as water temperatures rise, Microcystis forms an iridescent mat […]. In early August of 2014, strong winds blew a lawn of cyanobacteria over Toledo’s water intake, which lies just outside the Maumee’s mouth. Tests showed that the city’s water contained dangerous levels of microcystin, a liver toxin produced by the bloom.
The source of the problem stretches for thousands of square miles across northwestern Ohio and eastern Indiana. The rich earth […] in the region produces hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of soybeans and corn, as well as wheat, vegetables, pork, and poultry. The landscape is a vast, flat expanse of tidy fields and modest farmhouses crisscrossed with county roads — but it wasn’t always this way. Centuries ago, this part of the Midwest was a wild expanse of wet forest and marsh stretching across a million acres, and early settlers who slogged through the muck and mosquitoes called the place the Great Black Swamp. […] On an 1808 map, the swamp, which covered most of northwestern Ohio, was designated as “land not worth a farthing.”
But settlers came anyway, felling the giant sycamores and oaks to create roads, and digging miles of drainage trenches to slowly bleed the water away from the muck. […] They [”the wetlands”] are considered a menace, a threat, a thing to be overcome. These attitudes are enshrined in state law, which makes impossible any action, including wetland restoration, that slows the flow of runoff through those miles of constructed drainage ditches […].
[S]oldiers recorded the striking bounty of the Black Swamp and Lake Erie’s southwestern shore. On an April morning in 1813, two hungry soldiers stationed at Fort Meigs, near present-day Toledo, walked down to the Maumee River. The clear waters swarmed with perch, muskellunge, sturgeon, and catfish. Plunging spears into the water at random, they caught 67 fish in 30 minutes, often killing two or three with a single stroke. Every river mouth west of the Sandusky held dense beds of wild rice, where waterfowl settled to feed, then rose in flocks that darkened the sky. The rice stalks stood taller than a man’s head: to feed, ducks grabbed the stems with their feet and tugged the seed heads down to the water. […]
In 1859, the Ohio General Assembly passed a law authorizing county commissioners to construct drainage ditches. Farmers benefiting from ditch construction shared the cost. The other Midwestern states also enacted laws authorizing drainage districts, enabling the construction of vast networks of ditches that drained great swathes of land — a mission that required investment and coordination, and could not have been accomplished by individual landowners. Through the work of drainage districts, the Corn Belt states would lose more than 95 percent of their native wetlands. […]
Some enterprising soul tested the abundant clay that lay a foot or two beneath the soil of the Black Swamp, and found that it made excellent tiles.
By 1880, more than 50 tile factories operated in northwest Ohio, and the Black Swamp was dismembered and used to feed an accelerating and diversifying cycle of human industry. The great wetland trees — ash, elm, oak, sycamore — were felled and used to build houses, make furniture, and power the railroads that sprouted up across Ohio. In the 1860s, Ohio’s railways consumed one million cords of wood each year as fuel, and an unknown quantity for ties. The discovery of underdrainage created a growing demand for tile. All this drove an orgy of forest clearing and land draining which in the course of five decades, from 1870 to 1920, completely erased the Black Swamp. A wilderness went up in the smoke from railroad engines, and flowed in drainage ditches down to the Maumee and Sandusky, which began to run murky and lost their once-bountiful populations of fish.
Among the descendants of the settlers who conquered the Black Swamp, drainage is viewed as sacred, while wetland restoration borders on the profane. In terms of water quality, a prime place to create wetlands would be where they intercept the flow of polluted water in farm ditches. That could cause water to back up and flood the fields, however, and it is forbidden under Ohio’s ditch laws, which have changed little since 1859.
All text, images, and captions published by: Sharon Levy. “Learning to Love the Great Black Swamp.” Undark. 31 March 2017.
