The marsh: hay, grazing, and the ditches that made fields

1830s–PRESENT · THE MIDDLE AND SOUTHEAST OF HARRIS, AND CLAY'S LOW GROUND

A third of the farm story of this ground is a story about water standing where crops were supposed to be. Chapman, who is this section's first-hand witness, describes Harris Township's middle and southeastern marsh exactly: land "unfit for agricultural purposes, except for grazing and haying," covered, before it was ditched, with "one continuous sheet of water, that lay upon the ground until late in the summer months," so boggy after the water abated "that it was inaccessible by man or beast." The Land leg of this build owns the drainage system whole — Juday Creek, the regulated drains, the drainage board's modern course — and this entry owns what the drainage did to farming. The first great work was the state's, and Chapman prints it as a farm fact: "The State cut a ditch commencing at the south edge of J. Balwin's farm on section 17, and running a south course about 160 rods, then turning southwest, which course it pursues through sections 20, 19, 30, 25, 26 and along the south line of the last named section, and also about 50 rods on the south line of section 27, where it takes a southwest course into and through Penn township." The result, in his words: "this ditch has so drained this vast area that it has become solid footing, and hundreds of acres are mowed." The marsh's first crop after drainage was hay — the mowing of the drained lowland is the township's first documented agricultural improvement, and hay off wet ground, with grazing beside it, remained the lowland's economy for as long as the record follows it. Chapman closes the passage with the era's confidence, printed here because the next century acted on it: "at no distant day the marsh will become tillable and settled by an enterprising people, at which time it will compare favorably with other townships."

The second great draining was private and institutional, and it belongs to the next entry's farm: Notre Dame's brothers ditched their thirteen hundred acres "in the most systematic way," in the Scholastic's 1872 account, until land bought as swamp was "rich prairie land." The third was piecemeal and familial: the People leg's John Lerner, the Mishawaka-born dairy farmer of the township's north edge, worked "marsh acres" that he "drained and dairied" — the sentence is the smallholder version of the same work, a family's ditching turning wetland margin into a dairy farm. What drainage never made of this ground is as much a part of the record: the county's famous muck belt — the celery, onion, and peppermint ground of the drained Kankakee-edge marshes in the county's southwest, carried whole in South Bend's build — did not extend here. Harris's marsh gave hay, pasture, peat, and in time corn ground on its drained sections; it did not give a specialty-crop belt, and the truck-farming test in the entry after next prints that negative at its full size. The ditches themselves, once cut, became permanent farm infrastructure with a permanent public frame — the county drainage board's jurisdiction, which the Land leg carries to the present — and the farm fields they made are the same fields the eastern belt of the closing entry still works.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), Harris Township chapter: the marsh description, the state ditch's course section by section, "hundreds of acres are mowed," and the tillable-marsh prophecy, in the words quoted — read first-hand as above.
2. The Scholastic (University of Notre Dame), 1872 farm visit, as compiled in Brother Aidan's Extracts 238 (University of Notre Dame Archives): the systematic drainage of St. Joseph's Farm (carried whole in the next entry).
3. This build's People leg: John Lerner's drained marsh acres (pointed to for the man; the drainage fact is this entry's).
4. This build's Land leg: Juday Creek whole, the regulated drains, and the drainage board (pointed to, not retold); South Bend build, Farms & Agriculture: the Kankakee-edge muck and mint belt (pointed to as the boundary of the specialty test).