There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that someone in the newsgroup would be able to tell us when the Drowned Lands became what they are today. Thanks, Charles and others for your generous information. A drainage project such as that certainly did not occur overnight. Mainly, I was concerned with my 5xGGF, Samuel Knapp who died in 1834. I presume he lived upon Pochuck Mountain and simply used his lot in the Drowned Land, like others did, for cutting firewood. Except for the "islands" it was certainly not a habitable place. One would think that a swamp like this would have been the source of illness such as malaria or yellow fever. So far, I haven't read anything about that. During my trip there in 1995, I drove south from Goshen and then went south and west from Florida. It was several miles before I encountered that broad flat valley that once was swamp and is now the Black Dirt Area. It was completely unmistakable as the land is definitely not even close to flat anywhere else around there. My thought on the Wallkill River part of the project was that it might have been done along with some of the other large water projects in the mid-1800s, namely the canals. The same sort of equipment or methods would have been required for both, probably men and shovels. So now we know. Some of the drainage ditches were actually done in this century --- oops! last century. Tom