The Grand Prairie

In 1853, a traveler said of Illinois' Grand Prairie, "I do not fancy there exists in the whole world such as a sight we beheld." What caught his eye upon emerging from the dense forests of the eastern U.S. was the astonishing absence of trees. Apparently only 6.3% of Champaign County's land was wooded even in 1820. Ford County's presettlement forests covered only 3.6% of its land, making it the barest county in Illinois.

If the plow did not chase trees into the stream valleys of the HEadwaters,as it did in so many other parts of Illinois, what did? Climate is thought to have played a part. This part of Illinois in about 9,000 B.C. is thought to have been dominated by deciduos forest. A substantially drier period beginning about 8,5000 years ago saw drought-tolerant grasses begin to take over. This climatic shift was abetted by fire which, in its ecological effects, can be dsecribed as a very brief, very intense form of drought. The flat landscape of the headwaters offered little obstruction to wind-pushed fires. Tree seedlings that stood in the path of these occaisional conflagrations were scorched while prairie plants, whose growth nodes just below the surface, emerged safely.

Prairie plants did not only benefit from the rich Headwaters soils - they helped create them. The plants that grew upon glacial deposits aerated these deposits with their roots, added organic matter to it when their top growth died each yearm and protected the soils against erosion. As a result, soils that developed under grasses are darker and more fertile than those that developed under trees.

By the mid-1800s Euro-Americans knew the soils of the Grand Prairie to be rich, in spite of their failure to grow trees, But Euro-American farmers shunned what one modern writer calls the "much dreaded prairies" until well into the 1800s.

Why? Permanently flowing streams were relatively few and far between, so that wells had to be dug for drinking water in most parts of the open prairie. Turning over the tangled root mass of open priaire took expensive special equipment and teams of draft animals; the sod was relatively weak and much easier to break on the fringes of woods, where prairie plants were robbed of water and nutrients and light by woody plants.

Then there were the insects. Mosquitoes that bred in uncountable millions in wettish places spread malaria. The green flies that dwelt in open prairies were so vexing in season - usually about six weeks each summer - that travelers avoided the open country or traveled at night. Swarms of these blood-sucking insects were known to bite to death horses that could not escape them.

So early farmers stayed near the trees. Stream corridors in the Grand Prairie offered shelter and forage for hogs and cows and wood for fires and building. So did the prairie groves - those islands of trees in an ocean of grass, usually located downwind of some natural obstruction that blocked tree-killing prairie fires.

Ultimately the biggest drawbacks to the conversion of the Grand Prairie into farm were econmic, not ecological. With no major rivers nearby, and with few decent freight roads, pioneer Grand Prairie farmers found it hard to ship what they grew to market. Once railroads linked the old Grand Prairie to the markets of Chicago, however, the land rush was on. In 1853-54, when the Illinois Central Railroad reached Danville, sales of once-scorned government land in the area skyrocketed to nearly a half million acres.

The mosquitoes and prairie fires are mostly gone, and the once-fearful isolation of the countryside is now sought after by people sick of town life. But people still shun the open prairie. One of the first steps people take to improve their homes - whether in farmsteads or in isolated subdivisions - is to plant trees. They thus recreate(using almost exclusively introduced species) the vanished landscape of the safe and shady prairie grove.

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