CHAPTER IX. - THE RECLAIMING OF SALT MARSHES.
"Adjoining to it is Middle Moor, containing about 2,500 acres, spoken of by Arthur Young as 'a watery desert,' growing sedge and rushes, and inhabited by frogs and bitterns;—it is now fertile, well cultivated, and profitable land."
The foregoing extract, from an account of the Drainage of the Fens on the eastern coast of England, is a text from which might be preached a sermon worthy of the attention of all who are interested in the vast areas of salt marsh which form so large a part of our Atlantic coast, from Maine to Florida.
Hundreds of thousands of acres that might be cheaply reclaimed, and made our most valuable and most salubrious lands, are abandoned to the inroads of the sea;—fruitful only in malaria and musquitoes,—always a dreary waste, and often a grave annoyance.
A single tract, over 20,000 acres in extent, the center of which is not seven miles from the heart of New York City, skirts the Hackensack River, in New Jersey, serving as a barrier to intercourse between the town and the country which lies beyond it, adding miles to the daily travel of the thousands whose business and pleasure require them to cross it, and constituting a nuisance and an eyesore to all who see it, or come near it. How long it[pg 192] will continue in this condition it is impossible to say, but the experience of other countries has proved that, for an expense of not more than fifty dollars per acre, this tract might be made better, for all purposes of cultivation, than the lands adjoining it, (many of which are worth, for market gardening, over one thousand dollars per acre,) and that it might afford profitable employment, and give homes, to all of the industrious poor of the city. The work of reclaiming it would be child's play, compared with the draining of the Harlaem Lake in Holland, where over 40,000 acres, submerged to an average depth of thirteen feet, have been pumped dry, and made to do their part toward the support of a dense population.
The Hackensack meadows are only a conspicuous example of what exists over a great extent of our whole seaboard;—virgin lands, replete with every element of fertility, capable of producing enough food for the support of millions of human beings, better located, for residence and for convenience to markets, than the prairies of the Western States,—all allowed to remain worse than useless; while the poorer uplands near them are, in many places, teeming with a population whose lives are endangered, and whose comfort is sadly interfered with by the insects and the miasma which the marsh produces.
The inherent wealth of the land is locked up, and all of its bad effects are produced, by the water with which it is constantly soaked or overflowed. Let the waters of the sea be excluded, and a proper outlet for the rain-fall and the upland wash be provided,—both of which objects may, in a great majority of cases, be economically accomplished,—and this land may become the garden of the continent. Its fertility will attract a population, (especially in the vicinity of large towns,) which could no where else live so well nor so easily.
The manner in which these salt marshes were formed may be understood from the following account of the[pg 193] "Great Level of the Fens" of the eastern coast of England, which is copied, (as is the paragraph at the head of this chapter,) from the Prize Essay of Mr. John Algernon Clarke, written for the Royal Agricultural Society in 1846.