Remembering the Great Black Swamp

The Rev. Joseph Badger described the area as "generally low and interspersed with gentle swells of excellent land, well-timbered, but between the ridges lie streams and hideous swamps of two, three, four miles in width. Stretches of mud and water from knee to belly deep to our horses extend from 8 to 10 miles."

The pioneer missionary was describing the Great Black Swamp, that immense low-lying tract of land that dominated the thirty-mile expanse between Ohio's Sandusky and Maumee Rivers.  In total, the swamp covered 1500 square miles and affected a portion of ten of Ohio's counties. So daunting was the swamp that northwest Ohio was the last place settled in all of the state.

Great Black Swamp Map

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Beech, oak, hickory, and elm trees reached more than 100 feet above the swamp's jungle-like vegetation, choked streams, and marshes.  The canopy blotted out the sunlight, making the Black Swamp a dark, depressing, and lonely place for many of those first settlers.  It was such a forbidding landscape that even the Native Americans left it to the wolves, snakes, horseflies, and the massive swarms of mosquitoes. 

More than one-third of the pioneers who settled in the Black Swamp gave up and moved on.  It took determination and endurance to remain. The Goll Woods is one place that some remnants of the swamp remain and can be experienced today. Lying a mile and one-half north of Archbold, Ohio, in German Twp., Fulton County is a 321-acre preserve that is believed to be the least disturbed woodland area in this part of the state. 

Immigrants from France, the Peter Goll family purchased 32 acres in Fulton County in 1834. Eventually, the Goll land grew to nearly 600 acres. It remained in the family for generations. The state of Ohio acquired the land from Peter Goll's great granddaughter in 1966 and dedicated it to a nature preserve in 1975. 

Goll Woods

Courtesy of ODNR

The old growth forest has some of the largest trees remaining in the state of Ohio and is truly reminiscent of the Great Black Swamp. Selective cutting only took place once - during World War I. Eighty acres of the preserve is virgin forest that the Goll family called the "Big Woods." You will see 200-to-400-year old trees; some of which have trunks four feet in diameter. There are cottonwood; sycamore; pin, bur, and white oak; pine; ash; and tulip trees. Their canopy is so dense, it still presents the eerie gloom of the Black Swamp that our ancestors felt. To learn more about the Goll Woods, go online to Goll Woods State Nature Preserve. 

Lightning and windstorms have felled come of these majestic trees just as they have for thousands of years. They lay on the swamp's floor, decomposing in the dark shade amid the native wildflowers and wood plants of ferns, lilies, violets, elderberry and raspberry bushes, and Solomon's seal. Look ever so closely and you will see  salamanders, toads, woodpeckers, an occasional wild turkey or a whitetail deer. And, always, always there are the mosquitoes.  For our ancestors, it was a hostile landscape that took everything they had.... and for many - it took their very lives.  For us, it is a natural treasure that gives us an appreciation for what our ancestors experienced in the Great Black Swamp.