yee. 
241 
north across five sections of land, once water, into the Little Calumet, 
makes a broad, deep cut in the northern sand ridge one mile west from 
Highland. 
The Cady Marsh proper may now be best examined by passing along 
the road from the present town of Griffith to the old stage road along the 
north sand ridge. The distance across is little more than a mile. The 
road crosses section 26 and has a ditch on each side. 
It is not probable that the composition of this marsh, as to its surface, 
is uniform, but there is, first, a layer of peat, from ten to sixteen inches in 
depth, then four feet of sand, below this about sixteen feet of clay and 
then gravel or sand. The depth to rock no one as yet probably knows. In 
early times, when covered with water, of course fires did not run over 
this marsh, but since it has become comparatively dry fires get started in 
some way; they cannot well be extinguished; and they have destroyed 
large areas of the peat surface, burning sometimes through an entire 
winter. Several years ago quite a quantity of this peat was dug or cut 
out and prepared for market, but it could not compete with coal and the 
industry was abandoned. From the southern sand ridge, along the road 
mentioned, sand now washes in large quantities, filling up the ditches 
along the road for forty or sixty rods. The flow of the water is toward the 
north and west. The ridge along the north end of this road, where the 
east and west road is reached, is about forty rods. wide at the base and 
“about forty feet to the crest of the ridge, so that an immense bank of 
sand lies along the north of this marsh, and just north of this bank comes 
the Little Calumet bottom land, which, between Highland and Hessville, 
is often in the spring flood times covered with water for a mile in width. 
The Chicago & ‘Erie Railway crosses the Cady Marsh between Griffith and 
Highland. At present portions of this once wet, impassable marsh are 
cultivated and the land is quite productive. A few houses have been 
built on it, and it is becoming a valuable part of the cultivated area of 
Lake County. It was a great resort once for “‘bobolinks,”’ but they have 
nearly deserted it now. 
As to its formation, if, as seems probable, the water of Lake Michigan 
many years ago extended to the southern large sand ridge of Lake 
County and remained for quite a time stationary north of the great High- 
land, or old Stage Road ridge, then the sand now over this depression 
between the ridges, which depression was left full of water, was washed 
16—ScrEencgE. 
