Drainage as its own article: the Kankakee edge and the making of the farmland

item 4 — the wet prairies and the marsh edge, drained

The prairie was a farm only after it was drained, and the river at the township's southwest is the drain: the Kankakee runs 133 miles in its modern course, from its source in Portage Township some five miles southwest of South Bend — rising, that is, one township east of this one — to its mouth, where it joins the Des Plaines to form the Illinois River. In its natural state it was a different river: roughly 240 miles of meanders through one of the great marshes of the continent, the wetland this township's southwest corner touches. The making of the farmland was a seventy-year work of law and ditching: Indiana's Swamp Lands Act of 1852 put the marsh counties in the drainage business, the first ditches on the Kankakee system were cut from 1858, and the river itself was straightened and channelised in the great work of 1918–1922 that cut its 240 meandering miles to 133. Miller's Polanders clearing marsh timber in the township's south, the Polish farms of twenty to eighty acres that followed the clearing — the human end of the ditch lines. The named ditches and districts of Olive Township's own drainage stand in the county drainage board and surveyor's records, named here as the article's settler; the frame, the statute, the dates, and the river stand whole, and the two false pointers the audit flagged — Recreation sending the marsh's drainage to a Land-leg whole that carried it in two sentences — are answered by this article's existence.

Sources:

1. The Geological Survey / basin record of the Kankakee River (133-mile modern course; source in Portage Township; the Des Plaines confluence; the ~240-mile natural course; channelisation 1918–1922; ditching from 1858 under the Swamp Lands Act of 1852), read for this run.
2. Chapman (1880) and this build's Notable People (the Miller sketch: the Polanders' marsh-timber clearing; the Polish farms of 20–80 acres).