The muck crops: onions, celery, peppermint — and beets on the clay

1880s — 1940s

Black soil, specialty crops: The county's strangest farmland was its muck — the deep black deposits of decayed vegetation in the old lakebeds and stream channels, worthless until drained and then, in the federal surveyors' words, fit for crops almost nothing else in the county could carry. The 1908 soil survey records the specialty trade directly: on the Muck, "cabbage, onions, celery, and peppermint are grown to a limited extent," with abundant yields where the muck was mixed with sand and wash; corn on the better-drained muck ran 60 to 100 bushels to the acre, and potatoes did well on the muck's lighter phases. The fullest of these muck districts lay in the old Great Marsh of the Little River valley, southwest of the city: farmers pushed for its drainage from the 1870s, and by the late 1880s three main ditches — the Graham-McCulloch among them — had largely reclaimed it. Agriculture spread across the drained marsh at once, first in the moisture-loving crops the wet soil suited: onions, lettuce, and celery, and the valley "became well known for its celery production around the turn of the century." The same wetness that fed the celery fought the farmer — draft animals sinking to their bellies in the muck are a standing account of the district — and after the Second World War the valley settled into the grain rotation of corn, soybeans, and wheat. A second specialty ran on the opposite soil: sugar beets, grown on the heavy Clyde clay in the eastern part of the county and shipped out to the nearest sugar factory, at Fremont, Ohio. The 1908 survey preserves the contract economics to the cent — beets at $5 a ton, seed at $2.50 an acre, the company's tools at 55 cents, weeding and thinning at $18 an acre, yields that year of 8 to 10 tons — and judged that there was "no reason why the acreage of this crop should not be greatly increased." It was not; the beet trade belongs to that one documented moment, when Allen County's clays fed an Ohio sugar factory by rail.

Sources:

1. U.S. Bureau of Soils, Soil Survey of Allen County, Indiana (1908; issued 1910) — the Muck type and its crops ("cabbage, onions, celery, and peppermint are grown to a limited extent"), corn yields of 60–100 bushels on drained muck, potatoes on the lighter phases, and the sugar-beet account in full (Clyde clay, eastern county; shipped to Fremont, Ohio; $5 a ton; seed $2.50 an acre; tools 55 cents; weeding and thinning $18 an acre; yields 8–10 tons in 1908).
2. Little River Wetlands Project, The Story of Eagle Marsh / BioBlitz history (2014) — the Great Marsh drainage (farmers pressing from the 1870s; three main ditches, including the Graham-McCulloch, by the late 1880s), the first crops on the drained marsh (onions, lettuce, celery), the valley "well known for its celery production around the turn of the century," and the post-1945 shift to the corn-soybean-wheat rotation.