Draining the Swamp:

North America was once a much wetter place. In the United States, swamps, marshes, prairies, and wetlands dominated much of the landscape east of the Rocky Mountains. However, these wet places impeded both settlement and economic productivity. As Euro-American colonizers expanded west during the 1800s, federal and state governments took active roles in trying to transform these wet 'wastelands' into land suitable for settlement and farming. Most notable among these actions was the Swamp Lands Act of 1850, which allocated more than 60-million acres of federally owned lands to state governments, who in turn sold these lands cheaply to individuals and corporations that agreed to transform these wet places into economically productive spaces primed for staple crops.

Owing to the enactment of these polices, entrepreneurs, inventors, and tinkerers designed various implements that could be used to make wet places drier. These technologies ranged from hand-held ditching and mole plows to steam-powered tile-laying machines, further spurring a rapid expansion of drainage infrastructure across the Midwest. Many of these developers filed patents to claim intellectual ownership over their device, method, or improvement. These individuals functioned as some of the early systems-builders that helped shape the modern American drainage enterprise - an effort that has resulted in both massive economic benefits and equally massive environmental costs.

More than 50% of the original wet places in the U.S. are now dry, with Midwestern states including Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa losing over 90% of their original wetlands to agricultural uses from these historical policies and technological developments. In Indiana alone, wetlands and swamps used to occupy 30% of the state's total land area, but today that number has been reduced to less than 1%.

The video below shows how these drainage patents map across both space and time, showing the progression of drainage patents filed in the U.S. from 1849-1915. Visualizations like this provide insights into the spatial patterns that developed as the systems-builders of the drainage enterprise took hold across the American landscape, and particularly in the Cornbelt.

Below you will find an interactive map showing the counties where patents were issued for various drainage technologies in the United States from 1849-1915, including information related to each patent. But before we explore this map, it's important to understand how the map works.

So, let's first look at Piatt County in Central Illinois - that's the long and narrow county directly west of Champaign.

Each brown polygon represents a county where a drainage patent was filed - the darker colored ones represent counties that had more than one patent issued. By clicking on an individual county on the map, a pop-up window will appear containing information related to whatever patent(s) was/were filed in that particular county. For example, in Piatt County there were 7 patents (you can see this on the top left of the pop-up window) filed between 1849-1915, including Alonzo Purcell's Ditching Machine (patent no. 295821), filed in 1884.

If more than one patent was issued within a county, a number (1 of 3, for example) will appear on the top left of the pop-up. You can scroll through these by clicking the arrow located on the top right of the pop-up window.

While this information alone is interesting, the coolest feature of this project is that you can also view the original patent design by clicking on the "More info" link next to the Patent Image column. Clicking this will bring you to the original drawing of the patent, and gives you the opportunity to learn more about what these technologies were designed to accomplish.

For example clicking on the Full Pages button will display all of the drawings for an individual patent. Here are H.H. Eatherton's drawings of his Tile Ditcher from 1883.

Compiling the data for this map was accomplished by manually searching the annual reports issued by the Commissioner of Patents for inventions related to drainage technologies, such as ditching-machines. Each invention included in this dataset was cross-checked to ensure the technology was actually related to drainage, and not an unrelated device, such as a decorative tile rather than a drainage tile.

Below is the interactive map containing information for over 1250 drainage patents issued in the United States between 1849-1915. From here you can explore the geography of the North American drainage technology.

Have fun and stay dry!