Black Dirt Region

The Black Dirt Region is located in southern Orange County, New York, USA and northern Sussex County, New Jersey. It is mostly located in the western section of the Town of Warwick, centered around the hamlet of Pine Island. Some sections spill over into adjacent portions of the towns of Goshen and Wawayanda.

It takes its name from the dark, extremely fertile soil left over from an ancient glacial lake bottom augmented by decades of past flooding of the Wallkill River. The 26,000 acres (10,400 ha) of muck left over is the largest concentration of such soil in the United States outside the Florida Everglades.cite journal |last=Gordon |first=John Steele |authorlink= |coauthors= |year=1990 |month=December |title=Sowing the American Dream |journal=American Heritage |volume=41 |issue=8 |pages= |id= |url=http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1990/8/1990_8_22.shtml |accessdate= 2007-08-26 |quote="Orange County, with a total of twenty-six thousand acres, had more of it in one spot than any place else in the United States except the Florida Everglades." ]

Geography

The area mostly consists of flat flood plain. The few areas that rise above the valley floor are known as "islands", since they often were in times of heavy flooding. New Jersey's Pochuck Mountain looms just to the south of the region, and the ridge continues into the region as a small upland area called Pochuck Neck; there are two smaller hills within it known as Mounts Adam and Eve, rising to 900 and 1,060 feet (274 and 323 m) respectively.

History

Farmers generally avoided the area in the early years of settlement, because the soil, although rich, was frequently flooded and poorly drained. However, immigrants from Eastern Europe, particularly Poles and Volga Germans, had worked similar soils in their native countries and saw possibilities. In the mid-19th century they won a series of conflicts with upstream millers later dubbed "the Muskrat and Beaver Wars", giving them the right to route the river through a straight, controlled channel for several miles herecite book |last=Snell |first=James |title=History of Sussex and Warren County, New Jersey |year=1881 |publisher= |url=http://www.albertwisnerlibrary.org/~wisner/Factsandhistory/History/DrownedLandsoftheWallkill.htm |accessdate=2007-08-26] (The former course is now a creek meandering parallel).

They eventually began growing the pungent, highly-prized black-dirt onion on the land, taking advantange of the relative proximity of New York City as a market. By the late 20th century the region was producing an average of 30,000 pounds of onion per acre (4,800 kg/ha) Today, due to changing popular tastes in onions and different economic realities, that staple is not as profitable as it was, and farmers in the region have been diversifying their crops to include lettuce, radish, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, and, increasingly, sod. Development of the farmland is considered unlikely since the soil is very poor for building.

References