Soils: muck in the bottoms, sand on the plain

THE SURVEY'S OWN DESCRIPTIONS, AND ONE NAME TESTED NEGATIVE

The soil record of this ground is written in two materials: sand and muck. The Geological Survey's north-central Indiana water-supply paper states the general fact for the marsh country: in many areas which are or have been low and marshy there is a layer a foot or two thick of light, black soil largely composed of decomposed vegetable matter — "this soil is locally called muck, and in certain sections it produces large crops of onions and potatoes" — and where the vegetable matter accumulated in sufficient purity it formed peat, the same bed Chapman measured along the Kankakee at ten to fifteen feet. The soil survey's official series description for the marsh-margin ground is the Maumee series: very deep, poorly drained or very poorly drained soils formed in sandy outwash or sandy sediments in depressions on outwash plains and lake plains, native vegetation marsh grasses, reeds, sedges, and water-tolerant trees, the series established in Porter County, Indiana, in 1916 and of large extent across the lake-plain and outwash country of northern Indiana — the Kankakee basin's MLRA 98 among its listed regions. The upland townsite stands on the outwash plain's better-drained sands, the farmland Campbell in 1882 already rated the county's portion of the plain, with its admixture of clay, as the better farming ground of the two counties his survey crossed. One name was tested and is not there: there is no "Walkerton" soil series. The National Resources Conservation Service's Official Soil Series Descriptions hold no such entry — the query returns nothing — and the series that carries this ground's marsh margin carries instead the name of the Maumee country of the state's other lake plain. Joseph County behind them.