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A Survey On Champaign County

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Champaign County was first covered by the Illinois Glacier (191,000—130,000 years ago), which leveled the region and covered it in a deposit of boulder clay. The county’s topography was then formed by the Wisconsin Glacier about 20,000 years ago. As lobes of ice from what is now Lake Michigan crossed the county, a deep (up to 300 ft) pile of glacial soil was created and topped by numerous moraines (any glacially formed accumulations of unconsolidated debris) forming small, flat watersheds with no outlets. The moraines formed as the Wisconsin Glacier advanced and receded many times over the Midwest. The Champaign moraine system now crosses the county in a northwest-southeast direction, and between the moraines ridges are broad plains of what used to be swampy land, most of which has since been artificially drained.
Thousands of years ago, the territory consisted of wet, marshy land. The area currently known as Champaign County was formerly occupied by the migratory Kickapoo Indians before an 1819 treaty granted the land to the US government. European settlement of Champaign County was restricted by the amount of land that required drainage. Since Champaign County is situated on a large and very flat plateau, it had virtually no natural drainage until the 1870s when settlers began building drainage ditches. The resulting upland marsh lead to a high incidence of malaria in the region in the late nineteenth century. About one million acres (10%) of Illinois’ pre-columbian

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