Note 87 — Evans’s Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles—1818 (continued 2)

The Black Swamp, extending from the Sandusky to the Maumee River, and covering an area of over one hundred and twenty miles in length and an average of forty in width, was entirely avoided by early settlers in northern Ohio. By the Indian treaty signed at Brownstown (1808), the United States government acquired a strip of land to make a road through the swamp; but nothing further than the preliminary surveys being accomplished, the land was later transferred to the State, and the first road completed in 1827. It was very little settled before 1830. In accordance with a state law passed in 1859, a system of public ditches was introduced, which rapidly drained the swamp and transformed it into a fertile agricultural region.—Ed.