TOPE FAMILY PAGE

 The area into which the Levi Tope family moved and removed, Allen, Paulding, Putnam, and Van Wert Ohio, counties, was in the area known as the Great Black Swamp (see Figure 1, page 5).

In the early years, following the Ordinance of 1787 for the governing of the Northwest Territory, the Congress had experimented with the survey and colonization of the Ohio lands. Captain James Riley was appointed in 1819 to head the Northwestern Ohio surveying team because of his experience as a sea captain and his knowledge of navigation. Surveying the flooded acres of the Great< Black Swamp wilderness was much like navigating the watery expanse of the oceans where Riley had spent much of his life.[i]

Lois Snouffer wrote about the Paulding County, Ohio area in The John Jost Wagner Family,[ii] and her description can be applied to Allen, Putnam Counties and the upper part of Van Wert County, Ohio.

Lois cited B. Glen Colwriter, who in his video about the Great Black Swamp describes what the area was like around 1820,

...this place was an abysmal, human forsaken swamp, so heavily forested with giant oak, elm, hickory, sycamore, cottonwood, ash and maple that you could not see the light of day here during the summer months. Under water in all except the driest months of the year and even then water filled your footsteps as you walked. Infested with mosquitoes, gnats, flies, and horse flies, crawling with snakes, moccasins, and water rats and prowled by ravaging wolves and wild cats. It is no wonder that the first white people that saw the place called it the Great Black< Swamp. The only wonder is how they ever got up enough nerve to settle here, and then to transform the place so radically into this fertile mass of land. The swamp covers an area loosely described as thirty to forty miles in width, approximately parallel to the Maumee River, extending from Lake Erie southwestward to a point a few miles beyond the Ohio-Indiana line Page 2