The Great Dismal Swamp: A Republic in the Reeds

The Great Dismal Swamp begins just south of Norfolk, stretching across the Virginia-North Carolina line, a dark, jungled interior of Atlantic white cedar, peat bog, and still black water. At its center sits Lake Drummond, three thousand one hundred acres of natural freshwater. For most of American history, the swamp was dismissed as useless by white planters. That dismissal made it something extraordinary.

Beginning in the sixteen hundreds, people fleeing enslavement found in the swamp's interior a place where the plantations' power could not easily reach. These maroon communities settled on the high ground, islands of drier land within the wetlands, and built lives there. They planted corn. They kept hogs and chickens. They cut shingles from the swamp timber and sold them to nearby whites who, one period account noted, often left them alone as long as they paid their quota in lumber.

By eighteen sixty, thousands of people had taken refuge in the swamp. Archaeological excavations have confirmed that island communities persisted there until the Civil War. Some families had lived in the swamp for a generation or more. One account recorded a man named Charlie who had been born in the swamp and, according to his own testimony, had never seen a white man.

The Dismal Swamp Canal, completed in eighteen oh five and still the oldest operating canal in America, runs along the eastern edge of the refuge. George Washington had been among those who surveyed the swamp in seventeen sixty-three, hoping to drain it for farmland. The people already living inside it had found a better use for it than that.