Black Dirt Region

The Black Dirt Region is located in southern Orange County, New York, United States and northern Sussex County, New Jersey. It is mostly 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 in the early nineteenth century through drainage culverts and the construction of the Delaware and Hudson 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 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.

The area mostly consists of flat flood plain. The few areas that rise above the valley floor are known as "islands", since they often were in times of heavy flooding. New Jersey's Pochuck Mountain looms just to the south of the region, and the ridge continues into the region as a small upland area called Pochuck Neck; there are two smaller hills within it known as Mounts Adam and Eve, rising to 900 and 1,060 feet (274 and 323 m) respectively. The area is also very noticeable on satellite imagery by the color differential from its surroundings.

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