The Historic Wetlands of Delaware County, Indiana
Wetlands were once a ubiquitous feature across the Hoosier state. In the years just before widespread Euro-American colonization, the Indiana DNR estimates that approximately 5.6 million acres of wetlands existed in Indiana. The settlers found, as had the post-contact Native American tribes, a landscape saturated with swamps, bogs, ponds, marshes, swamp forests, lakes, floodplains, wet prairies, fens, broad streams, and sedge meadows.
Today, wetlands cover only 813,000 acres of Indiana. Farmers, developers, and government entities have drained 85% of the state’s wetlands in the past two centuries.
Delaware County is no exception.
While we have no written record of Delaware County’s landscape as the Lenape found it, the Moravian missionaries wrote on the 21st of May in 1801, “After 7 A.M. we left camp, and after wading up to our knees through a great swamp several miles long…we arrived at 4 P.M. at the anxiously looked for (Wapicamicoke).” Wapicamicoke was the Lenape village located near where Inlow Springs Road meets Burlington Pike.
In the early 19th century, the Lenape, settlers, and squatters found rich soil in the White and Mississinewa drainage areas, but also pervasive wetlands that made farming difficult. The Delaware County historian Frank Haimbaugh wrote that, “A considerable section of the county was in its natural condition poorly drained and unfit for agriculture.”
The settlers found “poorly drained” farmland in large pockets all over Delaware County. Haimbaugh referred to them as the “black lands,” concentrated in Harrison, Salem, Washington, and Mount Pleasant townships. By the Gas Boom, “many thousands of dollars have been expended by private and community enterprises to reclaim the black lands and bottom lands along the more shallow streams.”
A.J. Phinney, in his 1881 state report on the geology of Delaware County, wrote about several prominent “black lands,” including a massive swamp around Prairie Creek. Phinney wrote that “when the county was first settled, a swamp which could be crossed only in a few places” existed in a depression of land carved out by retreating glaciers. The swamp was filled with decaying plant matter ranging “from ten to twenty feet in thickness.” Given its proximity to Wapicamicoke, this was probably the swamp that the missionaries waded through.
By the early 20th century, farmers had drained most of the Prairie Creek wetland. In the early 1960s, the remnant creek was dammed to create Prairie Creek Reservoir.
About a mile west of Selma in Liberty Township, Phinney noted a “peat bog” that was slowly being drained by farmers. Drainage, however, didn’t always mean that the land was secured properly for development. Phinney wrote that when the Bee Line (Big Four/CSX) track was first laid across the supposedly drained bog, the workers “returned one morning to find the result of their labors swallowed up in the depths of the treacherous bog, the accumulated mass of vegetation which had been strong enough to sustain for a time the heavy weight, had, given away, precipitating the mass into the waters beneath.” Nature, it seemed, literally swallowed Delaware County’s attempts at development.
Phinney’s 1881 map also shows wetlands in Hamilton Township near Royerton, Center Township west of the river bend, southern Salem Township along Bell Creek, and along the Mississinewa River near Eaton and Pitts Burgh.
However, the largest of the early wetlands was the Old Prairie Swamp in Washington Township, a wetland that remained largely intact well into the 20th century. The Old Prairie Swamp was a 200+ acre peat swamp that was thought to have formed approximately 10,000 years ago at the end of the last glacial period. As the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated north, a large chunk of ice probably broke off and formed a shallow lake. Over time, as plants grew in and around the water, decaying matter built up and formed a wetland prairie and the lake shrunk to a much smaller pond. In the latter part of the 20th century, peat was harvested from the Old Prairie Swamp, destroying much, but not all of the wetland.
Finally, just south of Gaston near Wes-Del, the McColm Bog covered about 30 acres on what is now Shadeland Farm. The ecologist, Alton Lindsey, described the McColm Bog in 1969 as “more swamp than bog” with “Sphagnum moss in limited portions of the wetland. On crossing an open moat-like channel which surrounds the swamp, one reaches a large central area of deep peaty substrate, covered by a simple forest.” It too was harvested for peat moss and topsoil.
Today, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management encourages the restoration or development of wetlands. In Muncie, the John M. Craddock Wetland Nature Preserve is a manifestation of this effort and offers a genuine glimpse into a bygone era of Delaware County.
Originally appeared in the Muncie Star Press, June 23, 2019: https://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/local/2019/06/23/bygone-muncie-historic-wetlands-delaware-county/1479378001/
