The Black Dirt Region is located in southern Orange County, New York and northern Sussex County, New Jersey. It is primarily located in the western section of the Town of Warwick, centered on the hamlet of Pine Island. Some sections spill over into adjacent portions of the towns of Chester, Goshen and Wawayanda in New York and parts of Wantage and Vernon, New Jersey. 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. 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.[2]
- ^ "Black Magic, Hudson Valley's Special Soil". Edible Hudson Valley. Retrieved 2018-10-03.
- ^ Gordon, John Steele (December 1990). "Sowing the American Dream". American Heritage. 41 (8). Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2007-08-26.
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.