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 17^th 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 18^th 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