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| Aftermath on Main Street Bridge after 1913 Flood |
It was about 16,000 years ago when the Ice Age was coming to an end. The earth's temperature was slowly rising, and the ice began to melt. During this process, large chunks of ice floated to our territory, creating Lake Erie, the Blanchard River, and the creeks that run though Findlay. The end of the Ice Age also created a glacier ridge, which effected the flow of our mighty Blanchard. This ridge has an awful lot to answer to, because without it we wouldn't have the flooding problems that we do.
The Blanchard's natural flow is to move north, so it may ultimately join Lake Erie. When it hit the glacier ridge, the river took the easier path, moving it's course to Putnam Co. before reaching Hancock Co., forever cursing our territory with flood water. Ironically, had that ridge not been there, we would have had difficulty keeping the river wet at all.
Nature choose the wetlands, but we are left to deal with that decision. Besides flooding problems, historically we have dealt with poisonous snakes, pesky mosquitoes malaria and mud holes. How we dealt, and are dealing, with the river is the history of our community.
Col. James Findlay spent most of the War of 1812 fighting several battles with the marshy land called the Great Black Swamp.
He had his soldiers cut down the smaller trees to fill the mud holes, and for the other problems of snakes and malaria, the men dug a cemetery. The earliest settlers followed his lead.
If Findlay was so harsh, then why did anyone choose to settle here at all? They could live anywhere they wanted to. I can't answer that, simply because there are no surviving journals, at least none that I'm aware of. However, we can assume the pioneers, being use to hard living, saw a kind of hope in the land. Somewhere beneath the muddy water was rich soil, perfect for farmland. It had to be that hope that lead the people to drain the swamp. Our ancestors were already use to working together, raising barns or holding sewing bees, draining the swamp was just taking the idea one step further.
That was a good start, but the problem is maintaining that newly claimed territory. Several tiles and pipes were made out of the clay found along with Blanchard's banks. Grates were placed in the middle of roads and fields, to allow the excess water to run through the pipes to the creeks, river or a ditch. The ditches were mostly dug with the Buckeye Ditcher, a machine invented by a local man for our unique land. Today, there are several holdings for the flood waters. We still have the old reservoir at Riverside Park, and the new one beside Riverbend. We can trust that more will be done in the future to help Findlay cope with a problem that will probably exist for generations to come.
The flooding problems of Findlay began thousands of years ago during a dramatic climatic change. Today, we have over a hundred years of dealing with flooding difficulties. There have been times when Main Street was several feet under water as far from the river as Main Cross, notably 1913. This past winter we had 3 freak floods, and as I type the water's rising once more. The true story is not that we have an emotional waterway, but that we have a community ready to fight the flood. We worked together to drain the swamp, but we are also working together as a community to help people who are still being effected by the flood waters. Perhaps the more important history is the one we're currently living in, one that records us helping each other out during the floods. After all, we are experiencing the same thing our ancestors did.
