Black Dirt Region

Before the region was drained around 1880 by the Polish and Volga German immigrants[1] through drainage culverts and the construction of the Cheechunk Canal, it was a densely-vegetated marsh known as the "Drowned Lands of the Wallkill".

The Black Dirt Region takes its name from the dark, extremely fertile sapric soil left over from an ancient glacial lake bottom augmented by decades of past flooding of the Wallkill River.

Immigrants from Eastern Europe, particularly Poles and Volga Germans, had worked in similar soils in their native countries and began farming the former swampland.

In the mid-19th century, they won a series of conflicts with downstream millers later dubbed "the Muskrat and Beaver Wars", giving them the right to prevent a dam from being built on the drainage channel [4] They eventually began growing the pungent, highly prized black dirt onion on the land, taking advantage of the relative proximity of New York City as a market.

Farmers in the region have been diversifying their crops to include lettuce, radish, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, and, increasingly, sod, hemp, and cannabis.