Indiana and Ohio: The Flattest Miles
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
The terrain you are crossing is the glacial till plain, a surface deposited and flattened by the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last ice age, about eighteen thousand years ago. The glacier came from Canada and moved south and east, grinding the underlying bedrock flat, carrying boulders from hundreds of miles north and dropping them wherever the ice happened to melt. The boulders you occasionally see in fields are called erratics.
They are from a different geology than what lies beneath them. The flatness is the glacier's signature. Before the nineteenth century, this region was an oak savanna and prairie, maintained in its open state by regular burning conducted by the Miami, Potawatomi, Delaware, and Shawnee peoples who lived here.
The burning management kept the forest from closing in, allowed the prairie grasses to thrive, and created the productive hunting and agricultural landscape that sustained large populations for thousands of years. The Treaty of Greenville in seventeen ninety-five removed most of the Indigenous presence from Ohio. A series of further treaties cleared Indiana through the eighteen teens and twenties.
The land was immediately subdivided into townships and sections under the Land Ordinance of seventeen eighty-five, a grid that is still the organizing principle of every county road and property line in this region. You can see the grid from the air. It runs regardless of topography, rivers, or any other natural feature.
The landscape is now almost entirely agriculture. The soil is productive in the way that only glacial till plain can be: deep, mineral-rich, flat for drainage. Indiana raises millions of hogs every year.
