George Washington and the Great Dismal Swamp

In seventeen sixty-three, a thirty-one-year-old George Washington joined other leading Virginians to form the Dismal Swamp Company, a land-speculation venture aimed at draining and profiting from the vast wetland straddling what is now the Virginia and North Carolina border. Washington took personal charge of having a large tract surveyed and apportioned among the partners. He directed enslaved laborers to dig a long ditch from the western edge of the swamp to Lake Drummond, a channel still called Washington Ditch today.

The project proved harder than expected, and the swamp resisted every effort to tame it. But Washington held his shares for decades, and the venture foreshadowed the ambition for large-scale land development that would define the new nation.