Considerable discouragement from the neighbors

The north and west of Eden Township were marsh, and the county history of 1882 is plain about what it thought of it.

These marshes furnish a great deal of hay, and are the home of an abundance of game, but are, nevertheless, a dreary waste, and it is likely irreclaimable for some time to come, at least.

That is the county's own historian, writing about ground that is now farmed.

Elsewhere he calls the same work bringing land seemingly irreclaimable under the yoke of oxen and the plough. Reclaimed Eden he calls a beautiful garden, if not a paradise, at least as near one as any spot in Hoosierdom.

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The first cut was a state ditch in the Big Marsh, and nobody's name is attached to it.

Then, a little before 1850, a man began digging on his own account in the eastern branch of the swamp.

Johnston Latta, at about the same time, a little before 1850, commenced the first private ditching, in the face of considerable discouragement from the neighbors, in the eastern branch of the swamp.

Nine words about the people who thought it was a bad idea. No name, no reason, no argument, no outcome. In two county histories, that clause is the whole of the opposition to draining this county.

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Latta is worth knowing about because he is not who you would expect.

He was a physician. He had been practising at Goshen in 1830 when his father came up from Ohio bringing him medicine and stores, and it was on that trip that the elder Latta heard from surveyors about the Haw Patch. In 1841 the son gave up his practice, moved onto the family land, and farmed it until he died in 1873 at sixty-five.

So the man who cut the first private ditch into the Big Marsh was a doctor who had stopped being one.

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Digging it was worse than it sounds.

The viewers and surveyors on these early ditches had a hard time of it in the trackless and bottomless bogs, and among the poison sumach.

The county paid for its share of the work out of the ordinary funds. In the 1882 statement of what LaGrange County spent money on, between the bounty for fox scalps and the criminals, there is a line reading on account of public ditches, one thousand two hundred and five dollars and ninety-one cents.

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Then in 1871 the marshes caught fire.

That was the dry season of the Chicago fire, and both townships that carried the big marshes recorded it. In Eden about nine-tenths of the timber was injured, almost the entire marsh burned, and the history says nothing but deep ditches and persistent fighting could check it. It calls it a season of fire by night and clouds of smoke by day.

In Clay it came up from the marsh southwest of Fleck's Mills with the fury of a cyclone. The whole population turned out and everything else stopped. A barn belonging to Widow Latta was burned, which is the doctor's widow.

And there was a funeral going on at the Sayler Schoolhouse when the fire reached that neighbourhood.

The sense of danger and the demand for help at the fire overcame every other feeling, and in a few moments scarcely enough were left to attend to the burial.

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Seven years later this county sent a Wolcottville merchant to the statehouse and he came back credited with a law.

O. B. Taylor was elected to the Indiana House in 1878 and re-elected in 1880, and the county history says he was instrumental in the adoption of the Ditch or Drainage Law. It does not say which law, or when it passed, or what it did, and neither does any other source in this archive.

What is on the record is what happened next. Ford's chronology for 1881 has one line.

Many ditches begun under the new drainage law.

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The machinery is described once, for a neighbouring county, and it is worth reading because nobody describes it for this one.

Under an act of 1859 the wet lands were advertised and sold by the county auditor. The money went to the state treasurer and became a fund for reclaiming swamp land. The governor appointed a commissioner to locate the ditches, let the digging, and certify what was owed. The state paid out of the fund.

Ford's verdict on it is two sentences long and the second one is the sharper.

The system was theoretically sound, but in practice the result varied with the integrity and executive ability of the commissioners.

By his own time the surveyor had replaced the commissioner and the county fund carried what he calls the enormous expense, just and unjust, of drainage.

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And the county's own historian, in 1882, had already recorded how it was going, in one clause, at the end of a sentence about the various laws of the state. He thought the drainage had produced about as much litigation as drainage. That clause is the payoff of a different piece, about the man this county credits with a law.

Not one case, party or year appears anywhere in either volume.

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By the time Ford wrote in 1920 the county had a different surface.

Johnson Township's lakes, he says, have been greatly reduced by the drainage of the county. In Clear Lake Township only the larger, deeper lakes are really entitled to the name. In Jackson, several lesser lakes have disappeared from the surface, and a pond a mile long east of Flint has been drained and under cultivation for years. In Steuben Township, many of the smaller lakes have either been reduced in size, or disappeared altogether.

Newbury's north was one great marsh and by 1920 it was hay ground going over to tame grasses. Scott Township, he says, has been completely transformed.

In 1890 somebody counted what had gone into the ground. The county atlas published three years later gives forty-five thousand eight hundred and five rods of drain tile in operation, which is about a hundred and forty miles of it, laid in a county thirty-six miles across.

It is the only quantity anybody put on fifty years of this work. Neither county history gives a figure of any kind: not a mile of ditch, not an acre reclaimed, not a dollar beyond the county's own line item.

At Flint the mill lost its river.

This milling plant was originally propelled by the falling waters of Pigeon River, but in recent years steam has been employed on account of the water-power having been destroyed by the drainage system in force in the county.

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One passage in either book comes close to saying something was lost, and it is three clauses long.

Buck Lake, along the north line, for many years, before drainage obtained, was a handsome sheet of water, and became a home "water resort" for the Pottawattomie Indians, braves and belles, when out on the trail. The spot was, for many years rich in Indian relics, and a few small burying grounds.

Was a handsome sheet of water. Was rich in relics. Ford never says the drainage took it. The tenses do the work and he moves on.

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The last man in this story was born in Clay Township in 1878.

Clyde Walb grew up on a farm there, went to the LaGrange high school, studied civil engineering, and was elected county surveyor and engineer, which he held for six years. Then he went into drainage contracting.

By 1920 he owned ten steam shovel dredges, which had, in Ford's words, excavated millions of cubic yards in the process of reclaiming thousands of acres. He took contracts across the state and beyond it. He helped organise the LaGrange County Trust Company and was its president from the day it opened. He married a Wildman from Wolcottville.

He was not alone in the trade. Ford's biographies carry a man who dredged in Arkansas and Missouri for five years and came home to buy into a hardware company, another who spent two years on the Harding brothers' dredges, and a Goodsell who spent seventeen years in dredge work, starting as a labourer and finishing as a dredge manager.

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Between the doctor's ditch and the ten dredges is about seventy years, an unnamed number of miles of ditch, a state fund, a county fund, ditch bonds, and a phrase in a county history saying it produced as much litigation as drainage. In all of it, one sentence records anybody objecting, and it does not say to what.