TOPE FAMILY PAGE

Great Black Swamp
Page 3    

A compromise gave the Toledo Strip to and the western 2/3 of the now Upper Peninsula to Michigan.[i]
  Happily, this incident led to the legislation passed by both Congress and the state assembly to macadamize and drain the roadbed, making it fit for heavy traffic.
   By an act of Congress in 1850, the United States government gave the State of  25,640 acres of these swamplands that the US government still owned and had not been able to sell. It was land unfit for cultivation unless it was drained.
  In 1859, the legislature passed the first ditch law designed to drain the swamp of standing water.  The other major factor for the development of the swamp was the successful building of a railroad through the area.  As late as 1860, there still were the only two railroads that traversed the swamp, but by 1886, the area was crisscrossed by dozens of lines.
    Paulding County, Ohio, developed late because it was part of the Great Black Swamp, an area that was formed when the glaciers receded.  According to a video at the Sauder Museum, you could buy this land for 12 cents an acre around 1820.
   Paulding county's virgin timber was cut between the years of 1880 and 1900, producing the greatest prosperity the county ever experienced, as well as the largest growth in population in its history.  The money produced by the cutting of the timber was used to build the towns of the county with the different businesses therein. Very little income in the county was not directly traced to timber.

According  to A Brief History of Van Wert County, Great Black Swamp was originally the greatest handicap to the expansion of the county. It made travel an ordeal and harbored malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This area was to become a great natural resource, as it provided timber for a logging industry that was to boom for over fifty years, and once drained, the fertile black soil produced record crop yields.[ii]  Further clarification of the situation is seen in this statement:  At the time of the original settlement of the county, the Swamp was said to cover most of the

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