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Bloomfield Blossoms: p. 56.57

Smith, Kay, 1925-

Bloomfield Township Public Library

Bloomfield Township (Mich.) -- History

Surveying -- Michigan -- Oakland County -- History

Swamps -- Michigan -- Oakland County

GB01a030

part of 'Bloomfield Blossoms' by Kay Smith

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REPORTS OF THE INTERMINABLE SWAMP While Detroit had been founded in 1701, the first white settler didn't get to Bloomfield until over a century later. Early reports of the nature of the interior beyond Detroit were discouraging. Surveyor-General for the North- west Territory, Edward-Tiffin, filed a report to General Meigs, Commissioner of the Land Office in Washington, D.C., on November 30, 1815, which read in part: "not one acre out of a hundred, if there be one in a thousand, would in any case admit of cultivation or it is worth the expense of surveying. It is an area of swamp and lakes in between stretches of sandy loam on which scarcely any vegetation grows, except small scrubby oaks." This report was circulated so widely in the East, where veterans of the War of 1812 were being given bounty lands as compensation, that in the school geography books the words "Interminable Swamp" were written across maps of the interior of Michigan. In all fairness to Tiffin, he didn't survey the land himself, but had others do it, and as far as Royal Oak, there was a swamp, well known for its impassability and its clouds of mosquitoes which made passage through it almost impossible. Every writer of the period mentions the terrible mosquitoes which could so drain men and animals of blood that they would drop from weakness.