Warren County
Local History by Dallas Bogan |
Contributor: |
Dallas Bogan on 6 September 2004 |
Source: |
The following is taken from Dallas Bogan's, The Pioneer Writings of Josiah Morrow." |
Return to Index to see a list of other articles by Dallas Bogan |
In the early settlement of Ohio there were numerous swamps in places where
no one today would suppose they could ever have existed.
Jacob Burnet, a young lawyer, went to Cincinnati to practice law in 1796, eight
years after the town had been commenced, and he found a swamp or morass extending
along the whole length of the town, which, it is believed, subjected the inhabitants
during the summer and autumn months to attacks of ague and intermittent fever,
and the first September as the young lawyer passed in the village he had one
of these attacks at the hotel of Griffin Yeatman. Several years later Daniel
Drake went to the town to study medicine and he found on its site in one place
a low belt of wet ground which had been beaver ponds and were still annually
filled with water, in another a pond from which the frogs gave regular concerts,
and in front of Fort Washington another pond in which ducks and snipes were
often shot.
The original site of Lebanon we would suppose was well drained by the branches
of Turtlecreek flowing on two sides of it, and there was a steep bluff on the
south side of the plat. Dr. Daniel Drake, who visited the place when it was
a new town, thought its site was free from ponds, marshes and other public sources
of disease, but A.H. Dunlevy says
there were three pieces of wet and marshy ground on the original plat which
he believed greatly contaminated the water of the wells in this, the oldest
part of the town.
The fact is that little swamps, bogs and marshes were common in the whole country
when it was new, and even in the Miami Valley which was perhaps as well drained
as any area of equal extent in the state, there was scarcely a large farm without
its swampy places. It is however, the swamps of large extent that we are to
consider.
The earliest writers on the topography of Ohio mentioned what seemed to them
the singular fact that the wettest and most marshy land was to be found on the
highlands dividing the principal water courses, while the driest land lay along
the margins of the streams. In the eastern states, they said, exactly the reverse
of this was true. Later writers on the geology of Ohio have called attention
to the same fact in stating that the highest lands in the state and the summits
from which the streams flow in different directions are not so well drained
as those on the lower lands and on the slopes. The divide between the valleys
of two rivers is generally not a dry ridge but often level and wet ground. The
engineers of the Ohio canal found three routes for a canal from Lake Erie to
the Ohio, and on all three routes the summits afforded good facilities for reservoirs
for supplying the canal with water in both directions.
Summit county, Ohio, got its name from having the highest land on the canal
between the Ohio and the lake. Summit Lake was in this county and a part of
its waters found their way to the St. Lawrence and a part to the Gulf of Mexico.
On the divide which separates the tributaries of the Ohio from the streams which
flow into Lake Erie are a large number of little lakes and marshes. Newbury-J.L.J.L.
Newbury, of the Ohio Geological Survey, visited and mapped nearly one hundred
of these little lakes within a circle of a radius of twenty miles from a point
in Summit county. Some of the marshes and peat bogs in the region were formerly
little lakes which have been filled up by a growth of vegetation. The peat in
these marshes in some places has a depth of twenty or thirty feet.
Early in the last century the pioneer in traveling westward from Lebanon and
crossing the water-shed between the Miami rivers, found this water-shed was
an extensive piece of swampy ground belonging to the Shakers, and a part of
the water falling upon it made its sluggish way into the Little Miami and a
part into the Great Miami. Bogs and swamps and wet and miry land in the early
settlement of the country were in fact characteristic of water-sheds which had
any considerable breadth of surface.
A sufficient explanation of this fact which once seemed singular is perhaps
to be found in the greater volume of water received by the land below the water-
shed. The summit receives only the water which falls in rain upon it, while
the lower portions of the slopes and the low lands on the margins of the streams
receive the drainage of all the land lying above them. This greater accumulation
of water is sufficient to wash away obstructions and to cut out channels which
completely drain any ponds of swamps which have at one time been formed. The
lower depressions would also be filled up by the material washed down from above
and would thus cease to be ponds or swamps.
The swamps and ponds on the highlands were the sources of the streams and
rivulets, and gave them a much more even stage of water thruout the year than
they now have. They were also the source of many springs on the lower levels.
Sluggish streams flowing from the wet grounds were half-choked by logs, fallen
branches and leaves and roots of growing vegetation. The water from rain and
melted snow was retained; being protected from speedy evaporation not only by
the dense foliage but by a heavy coating of fallen leaves, and was discharged
into slow running creeks and thence into the larger streams. It was possible
to go in large canoes from the Ohio to Lake Erie by ascending one river and
descending another with only a few miles of portage between the source of the
rivers.
Before the forest were cleared many little flour and saw mills stood on small
streams which furnished water-power for running them much of the year. The machinery
of these mills was simple and inexpensive and the dams were easily constructed
of logs and brush. While these mills could not have run all the year round,
their owners were often farmers who could work on their farms during the dry
seasons. These mills could not now be profitably run, not only because of the
insufficient supply of water during the greater portion of the year but because
the greater floods in times of heavy rains would make more expensive dams necessary.
The southeastern corner of Warren county is a part of an extended tract which
takes in portions of four counties, Clinton, Warren, Clermont and Brown, the
surface of which was in many places almost a dead level and which originally
constituted an area of white oak swamps and was long known as "the swamps."
Most of this land has been reclaimed but in times of abundant rains they are
still wet lands, and in many places the water can be taken from them with nearly
equal facility in different directions. The forest trees most commonly found
on flat-lying tract were the swamp spanish oak, white oak, burr oak, swamp white
oak, the red or swamp maple, the beech and the elm.
Rev. James Smith, who traveled from Williamsburg eastward to Chillicothe in
1797, long before this region was settled, described the country on the stream
called White Oak, now in Brown county as "an amazing level and sometimes
swampy country." It is worthy of notice that this level and swampy ground
was not far from the Ohio and had an elevation of several hundred feet above
that river, and the streams rising in this region have a rapid fall in reaching
the Ohio.
An early writer on these wetlands in Clinton county says: "The swamp lands
are invariably found at the head of water courses, and from their peculiar situations
are easily reclaimed. It has generally been found that as the fallen timber
and other obstructions are removed, these lands become fit for cultivation.
In a reclaimed state they are inexhaustible in fertility."
Benjamin Morris, who came to Bethel in Clermont county in 1804, wrote in 1847
concerning the wetlands of Clermont county:
"When I first came the wet land of which there was a large proportion in
the middle and northern part was considered almost worthless, but a great change
in public opinion has taken place in relation to its value. At that time these
lands were covered with water more than half the summer, and we called them
'slashes.' Now the water leaves the surface in the woods early in the spring.
Forty years ago the evenings were cool as the sun went down. I have no recollection
of warm nights for many years after I came, and their coolness was a matter
of general remark among the emigrants from the old states. I believe it was
owing to the immense forests that covered the country and shut out the rays
of heat of the sun from the surface of the ground, and after sunset there was
no warm earth to impart heat to the atmosphere."
The wet lands were slowly settled. There was great difficulty in making passable
roads thru them. When they were so extensive the road could not be laid around
them the only resource was to corduroy them. This was sometimes done with round
logs laid transversely, later with logs split into two parts with the flat side
upward. An important road passing from Cincinnati thru Columbia, Newtown, Williamsburg
and Newmarket to Chillicothe encountered a swampy region. A traveler in 1809
said that it was remarkable for the deep swamp east of Williamsburg for two
miles on the west side of White Oak creek.
When a well drained tract in the region of wet lands could be found it would
first be occupied by emigrants, even if it was broken and rough land. The dreary
and uninviting swamps were slowly reclaimed and settled. Large tracts embracing
many thousand acres in the northern part of what is now Brown county and not
far from the old town Williamsburg, which was long the principal town and county
seat of Clermont county, remained a wilderness long after other portions of
Brown and Clermont counties were well settled. Some of these lands were not
even surveyed until 1838. The author of Green township in Brown county states
that wild deer were shot in that township as late as 1848, and a few wild turkeys
were still to be found in the township at the time of the writing of the history
in 1882.
A good portion of Washington township, Warren county, consisted of swamp lands
which long delayed the settlement. Squire Samuel Harris, in his history of this
township, says that the highest lands of the township lie not far from its center
and on this high land was a swamp called Sweet Gum Swamp. The waters from this
swamp moved slowly northward by a sluggish stream into Flat Fork which empties
into Caesar's creek. The Flat Fork swamps remained a wilderness until 1840 when
the Harrises, John Hadley and John Wilkerson opened up farms upon it, and soon
the land was found to compare favorably with any other in the township.
Harlan township when covered with the original forest held the largest body
of flat and wet lands in this county. These wet lands caused the township to
have a sparse population for many years after the organization of the county
and long delayed the making of a good road thru it. The first road established
by authority of law in the township was laid out in 1809 by the county commissioners,
six years after the organization of the county. These wet lands, it was afterward
found, could be easily reclaimed by clearing the forests and making artificially
drained and proved among the most valuable and fertile in the township.
In my boyhood these level lands, tho they had largely been reclaimed, were still
called "the swamps" on the west side of the Little Miami. In my sixteenth
year I was riding on horseback over a dry and dusty road in Harlan township.
I inquired of a farmer, "How far is it to the swamps?" "You are
in them now," was the reply.
Before the construction of the Warren County Canal, the waters of Shaker Creek,
flowing westward united with the waters of Miller's Run, which came in from
the south. The two streams meeting on level ground, on the watershed between
the two Miami Rivers, spread over a large tract of several hundred acres, which
was known as Shaker Swamp. Thru this swamp, which was covered with woods and
decaying logs and branches of fallen trees, the waters had no distinct channel,
but tended toward the northwest and entered a branch of Dick's Creek thru which
they flowed into the Great Miami. About 1825, the Shaker
Society cut an artificial channel for Shaker Creek for the purpose of shortening
the creek thru the lands of the society, and about 1835, the Warren County Canal
was constructed along the eastern borders of the swamp.
At one time, it was proposed to convert the swamp into a reservoir for the purpose
of feeding the canal, but this was never done. The waters of Shaker Creek were
intercepted by the canal, into which it flowed from the east. On the west embankment
of the canal, at the point of confluence, a waste-weir was constructed for the
passage of the surplus water. The waste-weir was found not to answer the purpose
intended in times of freshet, for the want of sufficient fall, and, eighteen
months afterward, it was removed to a point a mile and a quarter farther north,
whence the surplus water flowed into Dick's creek. Thenceforward so long as
the canal was kept in operation, the waters of Shaker creek flowed into and
were mingled with the waters of the canal.
About 1848, a breach was made in the west bank of the canal, not far from the
waste-weir, which was never repaired, and about the same time the state abandoned
the canal as one of its public works. After the abandonment of the canal the
waters of Shaker Creek flowed along the line of the canal and were discharged
thru the breach and overflowed in times of freshets, one or two hundred acres
of land, which had not been overflown before the construction of the canal.
Litigation thus rose, which was settled in the Supreme court of the state. The
Supreme court held that the owners of land along the line of the canal had not
the right to keep up its embankment for the purpose of diverting the waters
of Shaker creek from their natural course, after the canal had been abandoned
by the state. In later years, the bed of the canal has been utilized as a township
ditch, established by the township trustees under the authority of law, for
the purpose of discharging the water of the swamp and Shaker Creek into Dick's
Creek. Nearly all the land formerly included in the swamp has been reclaimed.
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This page created 6 September 2004 and last updated
28 September, 2008
© 2004 Arne H Trelvik
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