Black Dirt Region

The Black Dirt Region lies in southern Orange County, New York, and northern Sussex County, New Jersey. It is centred on the hamlet of Pine Island in the western part of the Town of Warwick, and parts of it spill into the neighbouring towns of Chester, Goshen and Wawayanda in New York and Wantage and Vernon in New Jersey. It takes its name from the dark, extremely fertile sapric soil left over from an ancient glacial lake bottom and from decades of flooding of the Wallkill River. Before it was drained around 1880 by Polish and Volga German immigrants, using culverts and the Cheechunk Canal, it was a dense marsh called the Drowned Lands of the Wallkill. The area is mainly a flat flood plain, with a few low rises called islands, and it stands out in satellite imagery by the colour of its soil. The muck covers about 26,000 acres and is the largest concentration of such soil in the United States outside the Florida Everglades. It is best known for black dirt onions, and farmers now also grow lettuce, radish, potatoes, sod and other crops.