The land was uninhabited swampland and open farmland until the 1850s, when it became the town of Evanston, Ill.

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Think of the speculative housing developments in Florida swampland that were never occupied, next to golf courses that never got built.

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New Orleans sits mostly below sea level on swampland on the east bank of the Mississippi River and south of Lake Pontchartrain.

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The namesake founder of my beloved corporate alma mater went on TV every Sunday night and became Uncle Walt, which resulted in many millions of folks subsequently vacationing at highly developed former swampland in Central Florida.

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Ever since 1718, when Jean Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville, a French colonist, decided to build his settlement on a hurricane-prone patch of swampland surrounded by three huge pools of water (the Mississippi Delta, the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain), New Orleans has been living in nature's shadow.

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