Elizabeth City: Where the Dismal Swamp Meets the Civil War

Elizabeth City sits at the head of the Pasquotank River where it drains into Albemarle Sound, a position that made it simultaneously hard to reach and impossible to ignore. The first European settlers arrived in the sixteen sixties, and the area's earliest colonial assembly met at Pasquotank County in sixteen sixty-five , one of the first legislative gatherings anywhere in what would become North Carolina.

In sixteen seventy-seven, the Culpeper Rebellion, an early colonial uprising against British customs enforcement, erupted right here, decades before the more famous Boston provocations. The townspeople were not docile subjects.

Elizabeth City was formally founded in seventeen ninety-three and almost immediately became the southern terminus of the Dismal Swamp Canal, one of the oldest artificial waterways in the United States. George Washington had promoted the canal as early as seventeen sixty-three, seeing the swamp's timber as a commercial prize. When the canal opened in eighteen five, Elizabeth City became the hinge between Chesapeake Bay trade and the North Carolina interior , a position that turned the antebellum decades between eighteen thirty and eighteen sixty-one into a boom.

The Civil War ended that boom violently. Confederate forces held a small fleet here, and Union Admiral Louis Goldsborough's gunboats drove them out in February eighteen sixty-two. Citizens set the town on fire before the Union advance and fled on foot. One Union officer described what he found as a place as dead as a graveyard.

The burning shaped the city that exists today. Most antebellum buildings were lost. Elizabeth City rebuilt slowly, becoming a canal and lumber port again through the late nineteenth century. The Dismal Swamp Canal still runs, still navigable, the oldest continuously operating man-made waterway in America , and the original reason this city exists at all.