Ask any real estate salesperson what the three best
attributes that makes land valuable, and the answer will be “location,
location, location.” Location is
important but, to an experienced salesman, other factors come into play. If a salesman has a vision of what the land
could be used for, then find an audience for it, he can sell it, if he has
patience. Even if the land was the
desolate Black Swamp of northwest Ohio, it just took time. Just ask Florien Giauque.
The Black Swamp, famous as a bar to settlement, was a wetland
stretching south-north from the Blanchard River to the Maumee, and east-west
roughly from Fremont to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
With the water table at or near the surface, the heavily wooded area was
flooded much of the year. Thousands of
years of autumn leaf falls enriched the soil with thick, sticky muck. Not only were roads impassable, the area
developed a bad reputation for banditry.
Outlaws were notorious for using the area as an impassable hiding place.
Eventually, the swampland was logged by timber
dealers. Stave and hoop factories
replaced the hardwood forests in swamp towns like Deshler, Holgate, and North
Baltimore. By the time the lumber craze
was over, the land was unshaded and flat as a pancake, a “grand cattail and
frog farm” was the saying. The federal
government, which still held title to the land, sold most of it to speculators
and corporations.
In Deshler, in Henry County, town founder David Deshler
bought up 10,000 acres of the former swamp.
His son John formed the Deshler Land Company. Buyers were slowly found, but defaulters were
many. In 1885, the Land Company hired a new manager, Florien Giauque. Giauque changed the fortunes of the Deshler
Land Company, and as one contemporary writer stated, “Florien Giauque turned
the cat-tail patch into a mellow grain field.”
Florien Giauque was born in 1843 in Berlin in Holmes
County, Ohio. His parents were from
Switzerland. Florien studied to be a
teacher, but was interrupted by the Civil War, in which he served as a sergeant
in the 102nd Ohio Infantry.
After the war he taught, studied law, and passed the bar. Giauque spent most of his legal career
working on real estate cases for his Cincinnati law firm, buying and selling
railroad land in Louisiana. But in 1885,
he found himself working in Deshler in his native state.
Giauque knew the Black Swamp and its reputation – a
“swamp with a past.” He also knew that
foreclosed land was readily available for purchase. Giauque bought Henry County land, cut
ditches, and laid tile, built modest farmhouses and barns, and “turned the
thick black swamp ooze” into a mellow black loam. “The miles of acres once crossed only by the
water snake and the muskrat now are stamped by the feet of grazing herds.”
Florien Giauque took undeveloped swampland and created a
farming paradise. He understood that
raw, treeless acres had little appeal for settlers, but farm-sized portions,
already ditched and tiled, would be salable and valuable. In 1910, Giauque sold his own holdings – some
2,500 acres – to an Indiana real estate company for $400,000.
By all accounts, Florien Giauque was modest about his
achievement. He “would rather tell
strange things of the long-ago Indians and highwaymen slipped like specters
from tree to tree in the dark green shade of the Black Swamp than to tell his part in its change from
savagery.” He is barely remembered today;
a business block in Deshler bears his name.
He died in Cincinnati in 1921.
But his real achievement, the endless ditches around Deshler, can be
seen any time one explores the country nearby.
[Information comes from
the article, “Heart of Great Black Swamp,” Chicago
Livestock World, October 17, 1910, and Luana Henderson, Florien Giauque Papers Mss. 1900 Inventory. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 2007.]
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