Great Black Swamp

Cakes as black as your hat.

They may have partaken of the soil, for here commences the notorious and infamous Black Swamp, the universal dread of travelers.

The hog of a landlord refused to take any money except in current New York or Ohio.

Not liking the appearance of things, and ascertaining the fare to Detroit, 104 miles, to be $7.25, and that we had to take an open wagon for a stage through the Black Swamp, five of us hired a yellow fellow who has a good team, cushioned seats, buffalo skins, etc., far preferable to stage accommodations, to carry us to Toledo, 42 miles, for $2.50 each, being 75 cents less than the stage fare to the same place.

We left Sandusky and entered the Black Swamp at 9 a.m.

The distance across this swamp is 30 miles, with the exception of a short distance about halfway called Portage River, on either side of which is a limestone bed.

But the rest of the way the soil is a black muck to which they say there is no bottom.

There was Fort Meigs on the opposite bank from Maumee and the British fort three miles below at Miami.

That part of Ohio is swampy.

1832, near the center of what's called Great Black Swamp, a 1,500-square-mile area stretching from lower Michigan through northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana.

Bowling Green's historic downtown district has buildings dating back to the 1800s known as the Boom Era.

The Queen Anne and classic revival style architecture dominates, but you could see hints of Italianate and Romanesque revival as well with some genuinely curious ornamentation.

Probably the biggest initiative of that work has been at our Forest Woods Nature Preserve, which is on both the Maumee River and Marie de Larme Creek out in Paulding County, where we own about 600 acres of land.

And the core of that preserve is, you know, one of the, probably the greatest remnant of the historic Great Black Swamp, which really has the natural characteristics and the heritage of this land stretching back to pre-settlement days.

Over the years, we bought, you know, we have about 100, maybe 120 acres of that core habitat.

but we bought another 100, or I'm sorry, four to 500 acres, which was in farming and wasn't super productive farmland.

And we've been restoring that to expand on that core habitat, the water quality functions, the wildlife habitat that it provides.

So what kind of trees and animals do you find in a remnant of the Great Black Swamp? You know, it varies from site

to site.

The trees are, they're varied quite a bit by the site, but they're high biological diversity.