The Little River and the Great Marsh

THE FOURTH WATER OF FORT WAYNE

The river that points the other way: A few miles southwest of the confluence, on the other side of the divide, the Little River — also called the Little Wabash — gathers in the low valley between Fort Wayne and Huntington and flows southwest to the Wabash. It rises in northern Wells County, enters its valley near present Ardmore Road, and in the centuries before drainage its valley floor was a single wetland: the Great Marsh, some 25,000 acres of marsh, slough, and wet prairie broken only by a few wooded dunes. The Little River Wetlands Project describes the early hydrology plainly: in all but the driest times a canoe could be worked up the Little River from the Forks of the Wabash to a point northwest of Fox Island, and from there the portage followed the drier northern edge of the valley to the St. Marys; in wet seasons, late winter to early summer, travelers sometimes canoed the whole way, and in dry ones they carried as much as the full distance — the portage of the histories, six to nine miles as the season made it.

The marsh was also a reservoir before anyone used the word. A second, southern channel may have served as an alternate canoe route, and Richardville is reported to have built a small dam to raise its water and shorten the carry. The draining came late and fast: Fairfield Ditch, completed by 1880, redirected the Little River's own headwaters into the St. Marys — the divide itself re-plumbed by a ditch — and by the late 1880s most of the Great Marsh had been drained to farmland. What the marsh had been doing for free showed in March 1913, when an estimated 5,000 cubic feet per second poured into the valley and the old marsh ground measurably blunted the flood peak downstream. The recovery began in 1990, when citizens organized the Little River Wetlands Project; it now protects more than 1,300 acres in the valley, including Eagle Marsh — established 2005, given as 831 acres in current listings and 705 in an earlier account — where in 2015 the Army Corps of Engineers built an earthen berm, 80 feet wide and 8 to 10 feet high, for a thoroughly modern reason: to keep a hundred-year flood from letting invasive Asian carp cross the divide from the Wabash side into the Maumee and so into the Great Lakes. The portage, it turns out, is still a strategic crossing; only the cargo being kept out has changed.

Sources:

1. Little River Wetlands Project, "The Great Marsh" — the marsh's extent, the canoe-and-portage hydrology, Richardville's dam, the 1913 inflow estimate, and the Fairfield Ditch diversion of 1880.
2. Little River Wetlands Project and Allen County Genealogical Society place pages — the 1990 founding, the 1,300-plus protected acres, Eagle Marsh (2005), and the Army Corps berm of 2015 against Asian carp.
3. Tom Castaldi, "A Little Wabash River and a Little River Wetland," History Center Notes & Queries (2015) — the portage as the only land barrier on the Quebec–New Orleans water route, and the drainage attempts of the late 1800s.