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Tallgrass Prairie Ecosystem

Tallgrass Prairie
Darby Prairie
© Tom Kemmerer

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the tallgrass prairie was a major ecosystem occupying 240 million acres of mid-continent North America. By the end of the century, it was almost gone. Most of the tallgrass prairie was converted to agricultural use during the last 60 to 70 years of the nineteenth century. The early settlers of west central Ohio found large prairie openings in the forest - islands of grassland scattered across a dozen or more counties. These prairies, dominated by big bluestem, Indian grass, and little bluestem, were outliers of the vast prairie farther west.                                     
In Ohio, wet and mesic tallgrass prairies occurred primarily in four main prairie regions, including the Darby Plains, which extend into the western portion of the Big Darby watershed. In the Darby Plains, because of the flat terrain and slow drainage, most of the prairies were covered with water for extended periods each year. At other times the prairies became very dry, and wild fire was almost an annual event.

These prairies, and accompanying soils, had developed over thousands of years since the continental glaciers had retreated from the area. However, as settlers learned how to drain and cultivate the prairie lands, the face of the landscape became changed so thoroughly that within a century almost all vestiges of the original wet prairies were obliterated.

Dr. Jeremiah Converse, a physician of Plain City and an 1848 graduate of Starling Medical College in Columbus, Ohio, described the prairies of Madison County (Brown, 1883:341-342) in this way:

This whole country was a sea of wild grass, and flowering herbs ...There were many other varieties that grew upon the prairie besides those that were found skirting, and in the oak-openings; such as the daisies, buttercups, wild pink, coxcomb, lilies and many others equally beautiful. It was, indeed, a grand sight to a nature-loving mind, to look over these extensive prairie fields and behold them mantled with so luxuriant a growth of vegetation and decorated so lavishly with an almost endless variety of flowers, variegated with all the colors of the rainbow...

Today, only remnants of these habitats remain in the Darby Creek watershed. These valuable remnants provide unique opportunities and genetic material not only for restoration of wet prairie communities and ecosystems in the area, but also for restoration of human awareness of the natural heritage of the Darby Plains. Prairie remnants in the Big Darby Creek watershed include the Bigelow Cemetery (Madison County), Smith Cemetery (Madison County) and Milford Center Prairie (Union County) State Nature Preserves.

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