Underneath modern-day Broad Ripple, southeast of where the White River considers flowing north before meandering south again, is an ancient peat bog carved out by a retreating glacier.
Bacon’s Swamp was once a large morass choked with clouds of mosquitoes and home to a plethora of unique plants. Although today’s modern digital maps show a “Bacon Swamp” just west of Keystone Avenue and south of Kessler Boulevard East, it is only a pond dredged and reengineered on a small part of the former swampland.
Around 20,000 years ago, following the Earth’s last deep freeze, the Wisconsinan Glacier began shrinking and the resulting melt revealed one of the southernmost peat bogs in the United States.
It wasn’t until Hiram Bacon, a Massachusetts native, moved to the area in 1821 with his wife, Mary Blair, that the swamp took on Bacon’s name. After heading to the Midwest as a surveyor, Bacon established himself as a prominent farmer. He and his brother bought land in the area and helped build a Presbyterian church.
A barn on Hiram and Mary’s land, across from their home on what is now Keystone, once served a station on the Underground Railroad, Agnes M’Culloch Hanna reported in a 1931 Indianapolis Star story.
“He built one of the very early log houses in Marion County, and later this one was a station of the underground railroad in pre-Civil War days,” the article says.
Freedom seekers came to Bacon’s underground station from Columbus, Greensburg, Lawrenceburg and New Albany to then travel to a Quaker settlement in Westfield.
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The site of Bacon’s farmhouse is now occupied by The Donut Shop at 5527 N. Keystone Ave. Across the way a Meijer stands where the underground station may have once been. The family owned about 400 acres of farmland around the bogs. Part of that land includes where Glendale Mall is today.
The Star’s 1931 article describes the swamp as a place nature-lovers and plant enthusiasts go to seek out wildlife.
The Indianapolis Times on June 4, 1950, ran a front-page article on the swamp, calling it Indianapolis Everglades, a nod to the River of Grass in southern Florida. Reporter Clifford Thurman wrote all that remained of the ancient bog by then was a 72-acre plot.
“Within whistling distance of one of the city’s best North Side residential districts,” Thurman wrote, “is a ‘bottomless’ ancient sinkhole.”
The area abutting the growing metropolis was a paradise for hunters and sportsmen, Thurman reported. The swampy areas surrounding Bacon’s farmland were a feeding ground for duck, quail and other game. Heavy mosquito swarms and snake dens also were abundant in the bog.
Purdue University once surveyed the area and concluded the peat bog was between 70 to 150 feet deep, and engineers assessing the area for development warned to not build roads across the swamp. They said the land would not support the concrete. The impact of that warning remains evident today in the gaps between sections of East 56th and 57th streets on either side of the new Bacon Swamp.
A pastor at the Meridian Heights Presbyterian Church is reportedly the first person to head to Bacon’s Swamp seeking peat to burn for fuel but was unsuccessful.
The peat Rev. T.R. White tried burning wasn’t compressed enough and researchers told The Times in the ‘50s that even the peat 50 to 70 feet down wasn’t compact enough to burn and he would need tools to dig much deeper to find peat suitable for burning.
Students from nearby universities also used Bacon’s Swamp as a place of study. Dozens of photographic records from Butler University Friesner Herbarium’s Digital Collection show the plethora of flora found growing in the bog.
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Native swamp species from roses to white oaks to smartweed were found in the moors, meadows and low open spaces while sedges and grasses such as blunt spikerush and western panicgrass were found in waste fields and margins of the swamp.
The collection also showcases non-native species taking root in the swamp, including multiple catnip species, motherwort and alfalfa.
A modern analysis of those historic Butler University records show the swamp was home to what the report calls high-quality plant species.
“If its 1920’s vegetation was present today, Bacon’s Swamp would be regionally significant,” the report says.
By 1950, Riley Adams and Cliff Mier owned and operated Bacon’s Bog Peat Moss company, which pulled peat from the area and supplied it to greenhouses and golf courses in southern Indiana and northern Kentucky, The Times reported.
State efforts were also underway to fog the swamp with insecticides to cull the clouds of mosquitoes. A consultant from Purdue University said Bacon’s Swamp was a potential breeding ground and the fogging helped alleviate the problem.
Removing the mosquitoes helped open the door for neighborhoods and commercial projects to spring up around Bacon’s Swamp.
By the mid-20th century, the site of the swamp was “all but destroyed” by urban expansion, a 2014 report from the Indiana Academy of Science says. The area was drained into the now-named Bacon Swamp engineered ponds.
Today, the hustle and bustle of modern life stream past the lands once rich with unique natural features and life.
While the soils characteristic of the former swamp are “unlikely to be recreated or replicated elsewhere in the county,” the Indiana Academy of Science report says all is not lost.
“The high-quality species that were once present at Bacon’s Swamp and are now extirpated from the county could be targeted for use in wetland restorations in Marion County,” the report says. “This would allow these now lost elements of the county’s flora to be recovered.”
Karl Schneider is an IndyStar environment reporter. You can reach him at karl.schneider@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @karlstartswithk
IndyStar’s environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.