In 2014, northwestern Ohio faced an unexpected environmental crisis: a toxic algae bloom that contaminated the drinking water in and around the city of Toledo for several days. Yet, that environmental nightmare did not develop overnight — the groundwork was set more than a century earlier, when a massive swamp was wiped from the map.
In his book The Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and the Most Interesting Place in America that Nobody’s Ever Heard Of, Patrick Wensink chronicles how an entire swamp ceased to exist, and how that decision would affect the state of Ohio in the years and decades to follow. In this excerpt, Wensink recounts the story of one James B. Hill, who changed the landscape of the region forever, in ways both good and bad.
James B. Hill should be patron saint of Northwest Ohio — or at least patron saint of this story. He invented a machine called the Buckeye Traction Ditcher, and he checks all my boxes.
Hill is our hero: His invention drained the swamp in a matter of years, leading to its complete settlement shortly thereafter. He brought the normalcy we see today.
Hill is our villain: His invention drained the swamp in a matter of years and killed practically all its native plant and animal life, which directly led to Toledo’s 2014 toxic algae outbreak. Plus, I find an unattributed mention of a John Henry–esque battle up in Canada between Hill’s ditcher and a fifty-man digging crew, in which the machine lays waste to the men, essentially wiping out an entire industry.
Hill is also our Falstaff: His invention drained the swamp in a matter of years, and it made him such a rich man he felt empowered to write a silly autobiography. I get my hands on a poorly Xeroxed PDF of Hill’s unpublished book. To my disappointment, it’s probably about what you’d expect from a high school dropout/ditch digger/industrial magnate. The most entertaining thing about the manuscript is his mildly humorous quirk of repeatedly asking the fairies on his shoulders for advice at crucial moments in his life.
Beyond that, there’s not much to go on. The man has left a very faint legacy behind. This is no attention-seeking titan of industry like Henry Ford or Steve Jobs (self-indulgent autobiography notwithstanding). Hill proves to be maybe the most Northwest Ohio of all heroes and villains — one who does not draw too much attention to himself.
James B. Hill bounced around Northwest Ohio after dropping out of school. In 1882, he was doing labor for a farmer and tried his hand at manually digging trenches and laying drainage tiles. Soon he had a reputation as the best tiler in Northwest Ohio. By 1892, he had begun working in a machine shop in Bowling Green, staying nights and weekends to work on his own invention, which he built without drawings or blueprints, instead making all the patterns by carving wood with a jackknife. In 1893, he sold a prototype of an automated ditch-digging machine for $700. At the exact moment his business took off, a national depression hit, and the machine shop went into receivership. Hill found a more affordable shop in Deshler and produced five ditchers there before moving again, to Carey, where business finally boomed and the Great Black Swamp was forever changed.
I drive to Carey, Ohio, one rainy afternoon to see if there was any trace left of Hill’s empire. Carey is about twice the size of Deshler yet offers residents about the same amenities: a few gas stations, a pizza joint, some beauty shops, and a hardware store. I have seen a hundred towns just like it in the area.
The steady downpour makes the roof of my car sound like it is sizzling. This storm hasn’t let up since last night, so the streets and most yards are now rippling with water. There is no historical marker for Hill’s Buckeye Traction Ditcher. His workshop, if it is still standing, isn’t noted. There does not even appear to be a street named after the city’s most fascinating resident. Nobody I spoke with had even ever heard of James B. Hill. Perhaps that’s because Hill is steeply overshadowed by the town’s Catholic church.
Specifically, by a miraculous event that reportedly happened long before Hill migrated to the town. On May 25, 1875, an overcast gray day not much different than the gloomy morning I visit Carey, the church was holding a processional parade to transport a small statue, Our Lady of Consolation. The wooden sculpture of a proud-faced Mary and an infant Jesus had been carved in Luxembourg and was on the final few miles of its journey to its new home in Carey.
Reports say a procession of hundreds of parishioners, including Father Joseph Peter Gloden and a troop of young girls in black veils, began to carry the statue down the road. Midway through the seven-mile sojourn, the clouds turned the color of ash, the bodies of every marcher shook with thunder, and blue shreds of lightning ripped across the sky. According to the church, “After the procession had begun the area was inundated by heavy rains from a severe storm. While it rained and stormed before, behind, and on all sides of the procession, neither the statue of Our Lady of Consolation nor anyone in the procession suffered one drop of rain.”
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We’re not tossing out the old masculine lists, but we’re giving them a much-needed refreshSince then, people have been coming to Carey with all sorts of ailments, claiming the statue has healing powers. By 1917, nearly sixty people said that their maladies — including deafness, curvature of the spine, paralysis, and even one little girl whose left eye was gouged out with a steel pen — were cured after a visit to Our Lady of Consolation. For decades, pilgrims returned, often in search of similar healing. The site was so popular that a 1995 article appeared in the supermarket tabloid National Examiner under the headline “Miracles of Faith: Cripples Walk…Blind See…Sick Are Healed at Amazing Church.”
Today, over twelve thousand visitors come every summer to for a two-day festival celebrating the statue. I was raised Catholic and never heard so much as a peep about this faith healing in Woodstock, not thirty minutes from my front door.
I pull up to the Basilica, a squared-off brick structure that seems like any other Northwest Ohio church, and decide to see the statue for myself. Inside, it is far more ornate than I anticipated — a huge, domed ceiling covered in fine murals. I wander a little. My wet shoes echo since I’m the only person in an enormous church. Hundreds of little red prayer candles flicker in the corner. Toward the front of the church is the shrine, the famous statue of Mary and baby Jesus, both dressed in matching purple outfits today.
I pause a moment, wondering if I will feel something supernatural, if my maladies will be healed. Nothing happens. Still, there’s something comforting about this place. There is a peace here, a calm, that’s hard to ignore.
Outside, I run into a tall, cowled monk named Brother Randy. As the rain speckles my glasses, we chat about the summer festival a little and I ask if he’s heard of James B. Hill or the Buckeye Traction Ditcher.
He has not.
Maybe that’s the way Hill wanted it. In a brilliant literary stroke of Midwestern modesty, his memoir spends about one hundred pages talking about life before the most important thing he ever did and then quickly glosses over the major accomplishments. Even the fairies sitting on his shoulder seem to be silent at this crucial juncture. It’s as if he is essentially blushing and saying, “Aw, it was no biggie. Anybody could have invented a ditch-digging machine that dragged a swamp the size of Connecticut out of the prehistoric ages and into the twentieth century.” And that’s kind of where the book ends.
But the Buckeye Traction Ditcher is a big deal. Not only did it drain the Great Black Swamp, leading to the construction of over tens of thousands of miles of ditches in Ohio alone, but the tread design also became the basis for all military tank technology in World War I. This machine would also go on to be used to drain parts of Africa and the sections of Florida that would someday become Disney World. The American Society of Engineers honored Hill and the ditcher in its Hall of Fame. In 1904, Scientific American called him a “mechanical genius.”
After my rain-soaked visit to Carey’s Basilica, I get a chance to see a Buckeye Traction Ditcher in person at the nearby Hancock County Historical Society. The ditcher looks like the skeleton of some more sleek contraption. In a perfectly Northwest Ohio design stroke, there is no artifice or aerodynamics to its appearance. By contrast, automobiles and trains of the era were becoming sleek and elegant. That year’s newest sensation, the Ford Model F, looked like a piece of art with its sprawling white canopy, spoked wheels, and aluminum body covering the engine and doors. The Buckeye Ditcher was not meant to win any hearts with its appearance. A Buckeye Ditcher looks exactly like the thing it was — a ham-fisted working-class machine built by a farmer, created specifically for dirty, difficult work.
Nothing I can think of looks quite like this. The most distinct feature is its eight-foot-tall boiler shaped like a gigantic beer bottle, which breathes plumes of white steam in YouTube videos I’ve watched. The next thing that sticks out is its unique digging wheel, looking more like a massive iron loom than anything farm related. It is taller than I am and spins without an axle. The wheel operates something like a riverboat paddlewheel, with a number of large, dirt-hauling scoopers affixed to the outside of the wheel, which carves a perfect trench. The body of the machine is long and sparse and sits on four wide steel wheels so that it can roll over swampy ground without sinking. The true stroke of genius is the second half of the machine’s job. After the wheel scoops a straight trench, another part of the ditcher drops clay tiles into the ground, creating an instant drainage system for oversaturated fields.
When in action, the Buckeye Ditcher looks like it is going in several directions at once. While its steam engine pistons punch the air, the heart of the machine performs some kind of optical illusion as its four steel wheels creep slowly forward while that digging wheel rotates in the opposite direction, like it is fighting itself, going against the grain of the land, chewing up soil and tossing piles back with each rotation.
Within a few years, James B. Hill singlehandedly did the impossible: he changed the landscape entirely and killed the unkillable Great Black Swamp.
The above is excerpted from The Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and the Most Interesting Place in America that Nobody’s Ever Heard Of by Patrick Wensink, published by Belt Publishing.
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