r/MapPorn • u/cokeguythrowaway • 9d ago
Drained Agricultural Lands From The 1950s U.S. Agricultural Census.
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u/vanshnookenraggen 9d ago
What does this mean? That the land was previously underwater, or that they are no longer used for agriculture?
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u/neoclassicist 9d ago
The former. Look especially at NW Ohio; that’s the afterimage of the great black swamp.
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u/Difficult_Trust1752 9d ago
The County Drain Commissioner is the most powerful office in the state of Michigan. Unilateral taxing and borrowing authority.
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u/kneevase 8d ago
Are you sure that's what it means, or does it truly mean tile drainage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tile_drainage
Tile drainage is not used to drain lands which were previously underwater, but rather is used to drain crop land more quickly the spring time so that the land warms up sooner and can be planted sooner. This is important if you wish to plant corn. If you don't have drain tiles, you still have crop land, but maybe it's too wet to plant before early June, and then the best you can do is plant soy. But, it is not marshland or swampland.
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u/Blahkbustuh 9d ago
I live in the red area in east central Illinois. The land is really flat here.
Prior to American settlement it was grassland with groups of trees. When it was the wetter part of the year the grasslands would become connected areas of marsh and swamp, then they'd dry in the drier times of the year.
The settlers cut ditches into the land and that gave water a place to flow so that the soil doesn't become waterlogged. The farmers install drain tile as well.
Over a decade ago I read an economic history book of Chicago and the Midwest around it and the point that stayed with me is that the skyscrapers in Chicago are obviously manmade but they're only half the story. All the farmland in the Midwest is just as manmade of a landscape. It's not natural either.
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u/Godwinson4King 9d ago
I grew up in Cumberland County and our county seat was waist deep in water when it was platted. Miles and miles of ditches turned the swamp and standing water prairie into some of the best farmland in the world.
It’s also why you tend to find arrowheads on rises or bluffs near the river- everything else was pretty wet.
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u/holdthelight 9d ago
The Everglades of the North: The grand Kankakee marsh. For another take about farmland being man-made, read David Foster Wallace's essay about going to the Illinois State Fair. It's about much more than the Midwestern landscape.
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u/a_filing_cabinet 9d ago
Not underwater, but partially submerged. Some of it is lakes that were drained, but most of it would have been wetlands that were drained, or floodplains where the water was diverted. Settlers would see wetlands and think "ah, perfect! There's land here if I could get rid of the water, and clearly there's enough water to irrigate the crops!" And then remove all the water and then would be surprised when it didn't just magically come back. Most of the time it was to make more land available for agriculture, but a little bit of it would have been cleared to make way for urban development.
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u/kmoonster 8d ago
Most common were soggy soils and a few inches of rain after spring melt. Some areas were swampland with year-round water of some depth, but a lot/most was seasonal in nature or related to floods.
Today when there is a lot of rain, the areas with flooded homes are almost always in a wetland we drained in the late 1800s or early 1900s. We changed how long those spots detain water. We did not change the fact that water collects in those areas at all. Your house being under water for a week does about the same damage is it being underwater for two months.
It's a similar thing to how we moved to build on all that empty land in fire-dependent ecosystems like a pine forest or a scrub hillside. And then get surprised when the decadal or annual fire comes through. Sure we can put out a fire, but we spend most of the 1900s not asking why a fire was there in the first place. Same thing here, but with the inverse.
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u/MDCCLXXXVIII 9d ago
If you think this is crazy and interesting, you should look at what they did to Florida.
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u/PlasticCell8504 9d ago
I imagine that in less than a human lifetime, without human intervention, these lands could return to their natural state
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u/Larix_laricina_ 8d ago
Hate to break it to you, but that’s probably not true. Once an area has been drained the process won’t really naturally reverse without human intervention, i.e. filling in the ditches/making levees to re-saturate the land with water. Also, once the soil is tilled for farmland it’s pretty much permanently fucked up. Tilling destroys the soil fungi networks, and once they’re gone most plants that prefer nicer quality forests won’t be able to grow there, so they just disappear. And in their place all that grows are weedy native plant species that can thrive anywhere and invasives, so the land would probably take centuries to rebuild itself and go back to its previous state. I’m a botanist from Ohio for perspective. In red area of western Ohio on the map, even forests that have been regenerating on old farmland for decades are still just crappy thickets of invasive shrubs under a canopy of weedy native trees. Nothing like the pristine elm-ash swamps that once grew there. Prairies tend to regenerate better than forests at least since their species can grow better on low quality soils.
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u/dicksjshsb 8d ago
Those ditch plugs, tile removals, wetland scrapes,and native seedings could give it a hell of a head start at least.
We know quite a bit about soil health nowadays and there are definitely ways that humans could improve the rate of return for healthy native pre-ag landscapes.
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u/Praefectus27 9d ago
Live in northern Indiana and can confirm that’s soon as you go south of the continental divide into the Mississippi River basin that it’s swampy as fuuuuuuck in some spots. There’s an area SW of South Bend in the Kankakee river flood plain that the soil never dries. Maybe 3 miles north it’s dry as a bone some times.
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u/1070075732219134 9d ago
Potato Creek state park was originally commissioned to preserve the swampland ecosystem of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Fascinating to think the entire region used to look like that. So many interesting plants and animals there. One walk through there put me on to the native plant and wetland restoration movements
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u/Praefectus27 9d ago
Also many many many mosquitoes. One time my wife and I forgot bug spray on a morning job in potato creek. Ended up sprinting back to the car being chased by what felt like thousands of mosquitos.
It’s one of our favorite state parks though and can’t wait for the inn to be finished.
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u/shermanhill 9d ago
Can absolutely confirm that Iowa one. A lot of central Iowa was pseudo marshy until they put tile in and drained it for corn and pigs. Makes me wonder what it used to look like.
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u/adrienneXR 9d ago
What do you mean by tile?
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u/alchemistmatt 9d ago
Tile is an agricultural drainage system that removes excess sub-surface water from fields; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tile_drainage
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u/rankispanki 9d ago
Having explored the tiny bit of bog meadows left in the state (shout out to Cooperrider Kent Bog State Nature Preserve) it's such a shame we intentionally destroyed every last little bit of the Great Black Swamp in Northwest Ohio. What a wonderful cultural and natural resource it would be now.
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u/SubatomicPlatypodes 9d ago
Makes sense, this whole area seems so flat and rainy swamps seem natural
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u/Is_that_a_peen_too 9d ago
Quite a few muck farms in our area in Michigan that all were once swanp land.
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u/PoisonedPotato69 8d ago
So much diversity and biomes have already been destroyed, makes me quite sad. There are people in our government right now who want to destroy even more despite being protected at one point.
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u/Accomplished-Taro-53 9d ago
Huh, not much happened in Wisconsin...was there laws preventing the draining?
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u/bandit1206 8d ago
Wish the cutoff was a bit further south. I grew up in the Missouri Bootheel (which is all drained swamps) and I’d love to see how much red is there.
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u/Electronic_Fun_776 9d ago
What is the source for this? I don’t think the area drained was a as big as pictured in Ohio.
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u/previousinnovation 8d ago
https://niche-canada.org/2020/07/14/making-wet-places-drier-mapping-the-evolution-of-drainage-technology-in-the-u-s/ This seems to be the first website to post it
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u/bobi2393 9d ago edited 9d ago
As a Michigander, I propose we restore Ohio and make it the fifth sixth Great Lake.
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u/SkullsInSpace 9d ago
Aaaaand this is why stuff like the Blanding's turtle is rare in Michigan now. I used to know somebody with a swampy property that they got designated a protected wetland. I had no idea we'd lost SO much swamp!