The Great Dismal Swamp Canal
"This dreadful swamp was ever judgd impassable,
‘til the line dividing Virginia from North Carolina was carryd through
it in the year 1728, by the order of his late majesty." From the
Journal of William Byrd II.
The
Great Dismal Swamp, located in southeastern Virginia and northeastern
North Carolina has long been recognized as a mysterious place and a
place in which people have easily lost their way. Scientists believe the
Great Dismal Swamp was created when the continental shelf made its last
big shift. The swamp consists mainly of peat and water. The name
"Dismal Swamp" originated in the 18th century for the swampy
area of land that lies between the James River in southeastern Virginia
and the Albemarle Sound in northeastern North Carolina.
Estimates of the size of the original swamp have
exceeded one million acres. Located approximately 30 miles west of the
Atlantic Ocean, the refuge is within the city limits of Suffolk and
Chesapeake in southeastern Virginia and the counties of Gates, Camden,
and Pasquotank in northeastern North Carolina.
In
the middle of the swamp is Lake Drummond, one of only two natural lakes
in Virginia. Surface area of the lake is approximately 3,142 acres and
the maximum depth is six feet. Several theories exist on the origin of
Lake Drummond. People have argued the Lake was made by a big underground
peat burn about 3,500 to 6,000 years ago. Native American legend talks
about "the fire bird" creating Lake Drummond. Other theories
regarding the lake's origin include a meteorite and a tectonic shift.
The lake is named after North Carolina’s 17th Century
Governor William Drummond, who, legend says, got lost in the swamp with
a group of hunters. All perished but Drummond, who eventually staggered
out ragged, hungry and full of descriptions of a vast lake deep in the
swamp. In reality, bad luck seemed to follow Drummond. He was ousted
from the Governorship by the Carolina Lords Proprietors in 1667, joined
firebrand Nathaniel Bacon in his rebellion against the rule of Virginia
Governor William Berkeley and was hanged ten years later when the
insurgency collapsed. Drummond’s lake, however, endured.
The
Great Dismal Swamp was the lure of many men seeking fortune from the
vast land and abundant natural supply of valuable lumber. One such man,
Moses White is rumored to have made over $1,000.000.00 here in the swamp
from harvesting Juniper Timber. His mill was in operation until the 1950’s
and a small part of it still stands off Rt. 158 in Pasquotank County.
One of the first and most famous business supporters of the Great Dismal
Swamp was George Washington himself. After surveying the Great Dismal,
young George Washington wanted to drain the swamp and turn it into a
vast plantation. That very year he gathered a group of investors, most
of who were his relatives, and formed two syndicates: Adventurers for
Draining the Great Dismal Swamp and the less romantic Dismal
Swamp Land Company. Shortly thereafter the Company bought 40,000
acres of the Northwestern swamp for the equivalent of $20,000 and began
digging the five-mile Washington Ditch, connecting Lake Drummond to the
outside world. A small logging settlement was built next to the ditch
called Dismal Town, the Company’s barracks and headquarters.
It
wasn’t very long before things started going wrong. The swamp was
either too wet and drowned everything, or it was too dry and forest
fires burned the land black. Washington tried growing rice in the swamp,
but conditions weren’t right and it failed. Faced with failure in the
swamp Washington got practical and focused his company on logging the
Great Dismal’s enormous old-growth thickets of juniper, cedar and
cypress.
The Dismal Swamp Company went full steam into the
lumber business, digging more canals and floating logs out on
flat-bottomed barges called ‘lighters’. Small towns like the Jericho
Mill, which stood beside a 10-mile ditch with the same name, sprang up.
One of their best sellers was cedar shingles for roofing. Shingles soon
became the 18th Century equivalent of aluminum siding because
unlike ordinary wood, cedar didn’t rot. By 1795 the Company was
cutting well over a million and a half shingles a year, shipping them
down the Nansemond River on schooners bound for Philadelphia, Boston and
New York. Logging and shingle cutting became the swamp’s only crop,
selling briskly for well over 150 years.
Before
the Civil War most of the men who cut timber or shingles for the Company
were slaves. They poled slim rafts up the canals or drove two-wheeled
mule carts along corduroy Gum Roads made of gum tree logs sunk in
the peat. Many of these men had dug the canals they now worked, and
lived in semi-autonomy in shantytowns deep in forest where white men
rarely ventured. The Dismal Swamp became their domain.
When the idea of a canal connecting the Albemarle
Sound with the Chesepeake Bay was first proposed to Washington he was
reluctant to plunge into another Dismal Swamp project. But with
encouragement from Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry he agreed and in
1793, thirty years after his swamp adventures began, the great canal was
started. It took 15 years for slaves to dig the 22-mile Dismal Swamp
Canal. It was little more than a muddy gulch, and to raise the water
level the Feeder Ditch was dug in 1812. The canal was predominantly
built by enslaved labor.
The canal permitted the development of new shingle
timbering grounds in a relatively unscathed portion of the swamp. By
1812, the large volume of business required a major reconstruction of
the canal, including the addition of several locks and a feeder ditch to
Lake Drummond to provide a steady and adequate supply of water. The
canal was only navigable for shingle flats and small flatbottom barges,
until the late 1820’s when enslaved workers widened and deepened its
channel for safe passage of larger vessels.
Roadhouse
and Hotels were established along the banks of the canals. One of the
more famous was the Lake Drummond Hotel, established in 1829. It became
an infamous rendezvous for lovers wanting to take advantage of the
lenient North Carolina marriage laws and fugitives seeking the isolation
of the swamp. Lake Drummond Hotel was nicknamed the Halfway House
because half of the hotel was in Virginia and half was in North
Carolina. It was this curious geographical characteristic that turned it
into a magnet for trouble. Duels took place there, and a criminal
element was drawn to the place because one merely needed to walk to the
other end of the hotel to cross the state line and avoid the law. Adding
to this dark mystique, there are claims that Edgar Allen Poe wrote
"The Raven" while staying there. These houses were notorious
as sites of duels and lovers’ trysts.
Tolls were charged for road and canal traffic to
alleviate the continual expense of improvements and maintenance. Before
the introduction of the steam engine, the shortage of laborers to dig
the canal was a persistent problem; it was backbreaking work under
highly unfavorable conditions.
In 1829, the Dismal Swamp Canal Company’s enslaved
Africans also opened a navigable route to Currituck
Sound by digging a six-mile canal to the Northwest River. Willis Hodges,
a free African American, worked on the Dismal Swamp Canal between
1835-36 to earn money to repay his father for land purchased in Princess
Anne County in Virginia. He noted that there were over 500 laborers, of
whom only 12 were free men. He described the harsh treatment the
laborers received. After an unnecessary beating of one of the laborers,
he considered working with the laborers to revolt against the offending
overseer and assist the slaves with escape to the North. He determined
that this was an impossible task since the laborers had no guns. He
resigned himself to leave South Mills, NC and return to Princess Anne
County, Virginia and eventually to New York.
Moses Grandy was an enslaved waterman who was offered
the opportunity to hire himself out and keep the money. The Narrative of
the Life of Moses Grandy; Life of a Slave (1843) describes the
life of an enslaved African American who worked in the Albemarle region
and in the Dismal Swamp Canal as a ferry man and canal boatman. Grandy
described the hardships, while digging and lumbering the canal in the
Great Dismal Swamp.
He remembered, "Negroes are up to the middle or
much in the mud and water, cutting away roots and baling out mud. If
they can keep their heads above the water, they work on." The
enslaved black laborers encountered torturous insects, copperheads, and
cottonmouths. After earning enough money to pay for his freedom twice,
Grandy was finally allowed to purchase his freedom.
In the nineteenth century, the Great Dismal Swamp was
a morass of huge trees towering over dense underbrush and delicate
ferns, inhabited by black bears, wildcats, wild cattle and hogs, and
poisonous snakes. It was to this inhospitable place many slaves came.
The foreboding swamp provided a natural refuge for runaways.
Following the American Revolution, there were
numerous instances of slave resistance. While some runaways were able to
blend in with free blacks, many chose to seek refuge among a colony of
runaways (called maroons) in the Great Dismal Swamp. The very nature of
the swamp made it possible for a large colony to establish a permanent
refuge. It was difficult to capture a slave once they reached the swamp
although occasional forays were made into the swamp to recapture
runaways with specially trained dogs.
Colonies
were established on high ground in the swamp where slaves built crude
huts. Family life evolved, and the abundant animal life provided food
and clothing. Some earned money by working for free black shingle
makers, who hired the maroons to cut logs, paying them with small
amounts of food, money, or precious clothing.
Slave disturbances in the early 1800’s caused much
alarm among residents living near the swamp. Tidewater, Virginia,
residents were greatly concerned about reported unrest among slaves in
nearby Camden, Elizabeth City, and Currituck County, NC. In the spring
of 1823, the situation was so serious a large militia force with dogs
was sent to wipe out the colony of slaves in the swamp. Even though some
were captured or killed, most of the maroons escaped.
A brutal slave uprising in 1831 resulted in the
butchering of 13 men, 18 women, and 24 children in Courtland, VA.
Following the Southampton County slave rebellion, it was feared many of
the insurgents planned to flee to the swamp. The leader of the rebellion
was Nat Turner, a powerful Baptist preacher with a large loyal
following, who remained at large for several months, causing speculation
he was hiding in the swamp. Expeditions searched for him, capturing a
number of maroons.
While
returning from a trip to England in 1842, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
composed his poem, "THE SLAVE IN DISMAL SWAMP," telling of the
miserable plight of a Negro in hiding. In 1856, David Strother wrote a
description of the swamp’s beauty and fearsome natives for Harper’s
magazine. As an artist, he sketched the legendary Osman, who, according
to legend, protected the Negro slave escapees. Harriet Beecher Stowe
used this sketch by Strother as the main character in her novel, DRED: A
TALE OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP.
Despite the method or living conditions, the swamp
provided the means of freedom that so many sought. The 1860’s and the
onset of the Civil War put the canal and the swamp in an important
strategic position for Union and Confederate forces. For Confederates
caught in the Union blockade of coastal North Carolina in 1862, the
canal offered a convenient supply route to Confederate strongholds in
Virginia.
The wartime activity left the canal in a terrible
state of repair. The Canal Company requested assistance from the federal
government but this was to no avail, and the canal was sold in 1878.
Although the canal had some traffic in the 1870 -1890 period, it could
not compare to its previous prosperity. The repairs and maintenance
needed by the canal made travel difficult, if not hazardous.
A new era for the canal came in 1892 when the Lake
Drummond Canal and Water Company assumed operations. This company
launched rehabilitation efforts in 1886 and in 1899 admitted the first
vessels into the "new" Dismal Swamp Canal. Once again, a
steady stream of vessels carrying lumber, farm products, and passengers
made the canal a bustling interstate thoroughfare.
With
20th century improvements in modes of transportation, the canal
gradually entered another bleak period in its history.
By the 1920s, commercial traffic had subsided except
for passenger vessels. The infrequent use and poor maintenance of the
canal resulted in its sale in 1929 to the federal government for
$500,000. The canal was then and is today operated and maintained by the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Though once a vital commercial link from Virginia to
North Carolina, the canal, the oldest continually operating man-made
canal in the United States, is quieter now and plays host to pleasure
boaters on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. Its designation as a
National Historic Landmark serves to remind canal visitors of its
contributions to the economic and social development of northeastern
North Carolina. Its inclusion into the National Register of Historic
Places, designation as a National Civil Engineering Landmark, and
recognition as part of the National Underground Railroad Network to
Freedom Program, are honors worthy of its colorful past.
ILLUSTRATIONS - From top to bottom
Sunset On The Great Dismal Swamp
Lake Drummond Hotel
Watercraft entering the Dismal Swamp Canal
The Great Dismal Swam Area Map
Lake Drummond
Old supervisors house on the Dismal Swamp
Slaves in The Great Dismal Swamp
Nat Turner
A sketch of the legendary Osman
The Dismal Swamp Canal today
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