[2] The glaciers destroyed or disturbed most of the preglacial drainage patterns and enlarged and deepened the Erigan basin.

It was preceded by a few small, disconnected lakes which lay between the ice margin and the southern divide of Erie basin.

This caused a catastrophic drainage of the lake known as the Maumee Torrent that scoured a one- to two-mile-wide outlet running southwest to the Wabash River known as the Wabash-Erie Channel.

[3] The lake's initial outlet was at present day Fort Wayne, Indiana, the lowest place on the border of the basin.

[4] The lake beaches, because of their sandy or gravelly constitution, form better lines for highways than neighboring clayey tracts.

Another advance of the ice blocked that outlet, raising the lake level to about 780 feet (240 m) ASL, the stage known as the Middle Maumee.

This involved the reversal of drainage in what is now northeastern Indiana and northwestern Ohio as the Maumee River outlet developed by capturing streams that formerly drained into the Wabash.

The Great Black Swamp that once occupied much of the land between Sandusky, Ohio, and New Haven, Indiana, was a remnant of the bed of Glacial Lake Maumee.

The altitude of the highest Maumee beach is 775 to 780 feet (236 to 238 m) at the head of the outlet in the vicinity of Fort Wayne and New Haven, Ind.

[1] On the south side of Lake Maumee the highest beach 775 and 785 feet (236 and 239 m) from Fort Wayne to Cleveland.