Draining America

A significant amount of U.S. wetlands were drained in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for agricultural and residential use. In the First Update of the National Wetlands Status Report 1991, Dahl and Johnson of the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that only 103 million acres of the 221 million acres of wetlands remained in the conterminous U.S. A total wetlands area about the combined size of Oregon and Utah were drained or affected in some way.
Much of this drainage activity was bolstered by the Swamp Lands Act of 1849, 1850, and 1860, in which the Federal Government granted nearly 65 million acres of swamp lands to the States for reclamation. The Act first applied to the state of Louisiana in 1849, expanding to Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin in 1850, with Minnesota and Oregon added by 1860. Of these states, Florida contained the lion share of about 20 million acres of wetlands, mostly due to the Everglades, which is the largest wetland area in North America.
Pivoting to the Midwest, the map below of Ohio and Indiana from 1819 depicts many of the river systems in which large wetlands were situated. The Great Black Swamp was a large wetland in a small part of northeast Indiana and a significant part of northwest Ohio, draining through the Maumee River into Lake Erie. The Grand Kankakee Marsh in Indiana and Illinois, situated on the map along the Kankakee River just South of Lake Michigan, was once one of the largest wetlands in the United States.
The 1823 Map of Florida below shows the Everglades in southern part of the state before any significant development. The Everglades starts from the Kissimmee River near current day Orlando (not shown on map) flowing south into Lake Okeechobee (labeled Lake Macaco on the map) which spreads out into a 60 mile wide by 100 mile long river flowing south out of Okeechobee to Florida Bay at the southern tip of mainland Florida north of the Florida Keys.