The marsh that was ditched away

Settlement to 1923

Headwater marsh, not the great marsh — and the ditching era that unmade both. Howard states the township's original ground directly: "It was chiefly heavily timbered clay and marsh land; and while the soil was a strong and fertile one, yet not until after its drainage was the locality looked upon as desirable for farming. The drainage has now to a great extent been accomplished, and some of the choicest farms of the county are to be found in Union township." The distinction this section keeps exact: Union Township held marsh of its own and sits inside the Kankakee basin, but no source found places it within the Grand Kankakee Marsh proper — the mainstem valley marsh, water standing one to four feet deep over miles on each side of the river, which ran through the county's western townships and was unmade when, by 1923, the entire Indiana length of the Kankakee stood channelized. Union's marsh was headwater marsh at the basin's eastern edge, drained south into the Yellow River system. The county's ditching mechanism is documented at scale: ditches "twenty to sixty feet in width, six to ten feet deep and now extending sixty to seventy miles below South Bend" through peat and muck six to ten feet deep; and in Greene Township the legal geography itself was redrawn along a ditch, a commissioners' order of 20 June 1898 replacing the river with the Miller Ditch as the township line. The topographic record names this township's own cuts — Heston Ditch (bridged at Linden Road and under US 31 on the town plan), Hoffman Ditch, Shidler–Hoffman Ditch, Lehman Ditch south of town, the West Branch Bunch Ditch, and Stock Ditch, whose headwaters watershed contains the whole town — named watercourses on the record, their regulated-drain status not established in this section and not claimed. Union Township's own ditch petitions and drainage-board record were not reached; they sit with the County Surveyor and Drainage Board, and the gap prints's note.