Drainage Apart from the plowing of the prairie, the most ecologically significant change made by humans to the Headwaters ecology is the least visible - its massive artificial drainage system. Euro-American settlers found the region a less than congenial environment. Much of its prairie land was too wet to farm, and the mosquitoes that bred in the wet low ground, wrote one local historian, "yielded to the early settlers their quota of fever and ague." Congress considered such land nearly worthless, and gave away 1.5 million wet acres to the State of Illinois in 1850 with the instruction to sell them (for less than a dime per acre) and use the proceeds to build levees and drainage systems. Only the biggest farm operators could afford to "ditch and drain" the wet prairies. (In the early 1880s draining on 7,500 acre parcel in Champaign County took four years and $300,000.) The General Assembly in 1879 had authorized the formation of drainage districts empowered to tax local landowners to pay for such improvements. Tiling of fields began on a massive scale in the 1800s. The area around Champaign-Urbana, thanks to the Universityof Illinois, became a sprawling outdoor laboratory for testing new ideas in drainage engineering. In Champaign County alone, some 120 drainage districts were formed, covering 85% of the county. Today some 65-70% of the land in Champaign and Ford counties is underlain with tiles, which empty into an extensive network of surface drainage ditches. Not since the glaciers retreated has any single hydrologic change so affected the Headwaters region. While human disease rates dropped with the demise of mosquitoes' breeding habitat (one of the happier consequences of ecological change form a human point of view), populations of wetland species types declined. Numbers of Blanding's turtle and the massasauga rattlesnakes have dropped enough to get both species put on the Illinois Department of Natural Resources' "watch" list. The eastern newt, once thought to occur across Illinois, no longer is found in the state's central counties due to the draining of prairie marshes. And wet prairies, once so common, today scarcely exist in central Illinois, and none at all are found within the Headwaters region. Next Sidebar: Geology |