Eagle Marsh Nature Preserve — Public Lands Institute

Devonian

Late Pleistocene Wisconsin-age glacial deposits (Fort Wayne Moraine and Maumee lake plain, ~14,000 years) over ~370 Mya Upper Devonian Antrim Shale bedrock

Epoch

Late Pleistocene (Wisconsin glaciation)

Native lands Glossary →

Myaamia (Miami); the marsh lies within Kiihkayonki (Kekionga), the grand village and political heart of the Miami Nation at the head of the Maumee, beside the portage the Miami controlled between the Maumee, draining east to Lake Erie, and the Little River and Wabash, draining west to the Ohio and Mississippi, the only overland break in the water route from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; Mihshihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle) called it that "glorious gate ... through which all the words of our chiefs had to pass from north to south, and from east to west," and led the confederacy that destroyed Josiah Harmar's forces at Kekionga in October 1790 and annihilated Arthur St. Clair's army on the upper Wabash in November 1791; the closely allied Wea and Piankashaw were Miami-speaking peoples of the same river system, and Potawatomi also hunted the surrounding Great Marsh.

Displacement & Tenure

Cession: Treaty of Greenville (August 3, 1795), following the confederacy's defeat at Fallen Timbers in 1794, ceded a six-mile-square tract at the head of the Maumee, the site of the Miami village and the new Fort Wayne, along with the portage right of way; Cession: Treaty of St. Marys, the "New Purchase" (October 6, 1818), ceded the central Indiana Miami country while reserving smaller tracts; successive treaties in 1826, 1834, 1838, and 1840 (the last signed at the Forks of the Wabash) progressively stripped the reserved lands and mandated removal; on October 6, 1846, the U.S. forced the last Miami community, several hundred people (published counts range from about 320 to 555), onto canal boats for removal to a reservation on the Marais des Cygnes River in eastern Kansas, splitting the nation into today's federally recognized Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the state-recognized Miami Nation of Indiana; the Meshingomesia, Godfroy, Richardville, and Slocum bands, roughly 150 people, had secured exemptions and remained.

Shadow History

The roughly 25,000-acre Great Marsh of the Little River, one of Indiana's largest wetland complexes and a Miami and Potawatomi hunting ground, was systematically ditched and drained for farmland between the 1870s and 1888: the Fairfield Ditch (completed by 1880) diverted the Little River's headwaters into the St. Marys River, and the Junk and Graham-McCulloch Ditches severed the marsh from its water supply; Eagle Marsh itself was drained cropland, its water held off by drain tile and pumps until the Little River Wetlands Project began breaking the tile and pulling the pumps after 2005. The Wabash and Erie Canal, begun at Fort Wayne in 1832 and eventually at 468 miles the longest canal ever built in North America, was dug along the north edge of the present preserve, following and displacing the Miami portage, and was built largely by Irish immigrant labor amid the malaria endemic to the undrained marsh. In December 2015 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed a 1.7-mile, roughly 7.5-foot-high, $4.4 million earthen berm across the marsh: because Eagle Marsh straddles the continental divide, a major flood could carry invasive Asian carp from the Wabash system into the Maumee and Lake Erie, and the berm, replacing an emergency chain-link barrier thrown up in 2010, closes that flood pathway.

Ecology

Restored shallow-water emergent marsh, sedge meadow, wet prairie, and reforested bottomland on former farmland; more than 500 acres seeded to native rushes, grasses, and wildflowers with over 45,000 native trees and shrubs planted since 2005; more than 250 bird species recorded, including nesting bald eagles and sandhill cranes, at what is described as the largest inland wetland restoration in an urban setting in the United States.

Hydrology

Sits astride the Great Lakes and Mississippi (St. Lawrence) continental divide, about 761 feet elevation, at the historic Fort Wayne portage; drains west by the Graham-McCulloch Ditch to the Little River, a tributary of the Wabash and thus the Ohio and Mississippi, while the Maumee River just north carries the adjacent basin east to Lake Erie; Junk Ditch bounds the site, and the 2015 Army Corps berm blocks flood interchange between the two watersheds.

Acreage

831

GPS

41.0333° N, 85.2317° W

Eagle Marsh Nature Preserve 1 · 2026-08-05 _DSF3973.jpg

Eagle Marsh Nature Preserve 2 · 2026-08-05 _DSF3983.jpg

Eagle Marsh Nature Preserve 3 · 2026-08-05 _DSF3989.jpg

Eagle Marsh Nature Preserve 4 · 2026-08-05 _DSF3993.jpg

Eagle Marsh Nature Preserve 5 · 2026-08-05 _DSF3994.jpg