Great Dismal Swamp

All underneath it is peat. Before and during the American Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp was a hideout for runaway slaves from the surrounding area. Some people believe there were at least a thousand slaves living in the swamp. This was the subject of Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, Harriet Beecher Stowe's follow-on to Uncle Tom's Cabin. All efforts to drain the swamp ultimately failed.




George Washington's Ditch

Washington acquired a 5,000 acre share in The Dismal Swamp Land Company (which held 40,000 acres). Along with his brother-in-law they purchased 1100 acres in Perquimans (now Gates county) and the Holly Grove area. He believed the land could be drained and used for farming. There was little profit in this, so he started producing jumpier shingles after the Revolutionary War which proved very profitable.

A canal was dug for use in shipping the shingles and other wood products. The first canal was cut five miles through the Western side of the swamp to Lake Drummond. Tradition goes that Washington had a plantation at Holly Grove and that he fell in a creek on his northward journey around the swamp. After this experience he called the creek "Deep Creek". The Jerico Canal was cut to Lake Drummond and the ten miles to Suffolk, Virginia. It was four feet deep and connected the Tidewater Landing to the Nansemond River and to ocean going vessels.

In 1830 a railroad was laid through part of the Dismal Swamp to haul out the timber, shingles, staves and other wood products to be shipped for sale.

Washington used slave labor for much of his work. If not slave labor; he hired poor whites for very low wages. It was hard and dangerous work. The workers cut trees and moved them to the main camp. They had to move around in the muddy ooze of the swamp, fight the yellow flies, mosquitoes and snakes. The logs or shingles were moved out on timber bogys pulled by oxen or mules to be loaded onto the rail line.

The workers lived in small swamp shacks. This was a small cabin made of jumpier poles. It had a dirt floor covered with shavings from the lumber products. One end of the shack was daubed with mud for building a fire. There was a small opening in the roof to let out the smoke. It was under these conditions the swamp became inhabited by shingle and gutter cutters and lumbermen.



The oldest and best known of the Dismal Swamp legends is that of the Lady of the Lake, a myth the Irish poet Thomas Moore canonized in 1803 in his poem, "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp." Based on local legends about an Indian maid who died just before her wedding and who is periodically seen paddling her ghostly white canoe across the waters of Lake Drummond, Moore's poem tells how the bereaved lover came to believe that his lost love had departed her grave and taken to the Swamp. He followed her and never returned but was reunited with his Lady of the Lake in death.


But Oft, from the Indian hunter's camp
This lover and maid so true
Are seen at the hour of midnight damp
To cross the Lake by a fire-fly lamp,
And paddle their white canoe.


Through the years, many a hunter and fisherman has claimed to have sighted the ghostly white canoe with its fire-fly lamp.

Like all good legends and mysteries, the Lady of the Lake is rooted in reality. Eerie lights in the middle of the night are not uncommon and have been attributed to ghosts, pirates, madmen, or flying saucers. What causes these strange lights is Foxfire (a luminescence given off by the decaying of wood by certain fungi), burning methane escaping from decomposing vegetation, or smoldering peat.

The next most familiar Swamp legend is that of the Deer Tree, one of the gnarled, bald cypresses along the edge of Lake Drummond, which is said to have been a deer that changed into a tree to escape its pursuers. Other versions claim the deer was actually a witch who taunted hunting dogs Having run into the lake, she turned herself into a tree to avoid drowning and couldn't turn herself back into deer or witch.


Bald Cypress

The 3.5-mile-long Feeder leads directly to the freshwater heart of the swamp, a 2.7-by-2.3-mile open expanse called Lake Drummond. The lake is named after William Drummond, a seventeenth-century governor of North Carolina who, legend says, got lost in the swamp with a group of hunters. All but Drummond perished; he eventually staggered out ragged, hungry, and full of descriptions of a vast body of water deep in the swamp.



A doctoral student from the College of William and Mary is spending a second year in the thickets of the Great Dismal Swamp in hopes of documenting the small communities fugitive slaves may have created. Daniel Sayers has located and begun examining six areas of relatively high ground, or islands - some on the swamp's North Carolina side - that may have been settled between the late 1600s and mid-1800s by slaves known as Maroons. Fugitive slaves from the West Indies or Guyana, or their descendants, were called Maroons.

"If there's runaways living in this swamp, they would be living on these islands," he said. "You can kind of see them here, you know."

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