Geologic History
According to Nansemond Indian Nation oral tradition, the lake at the center of the Dismal Swamp was formed 4,000 years ago when a great firebird descended on an immense, swampy basin in the middle of what we today call the Mid-Atlantic region. Observing from afar, a hunter plotted to kill the firebird. He first slaughtered her chicks, then gathered their feathers and talons as a disguise and sprang at the creature. Startled, she flew off, never to be seen again. Once her fire extinguished, it left behind a gaping hole in which the chicks’ blood pooled. According to the scientific version of the origin story, the lake, which British colonists named Lake Drummond, was likely formed four millennia ago by a peat fire in the Great Dismal Swamp.
Lake Drummond is relatively young compared to the swamp, which is some 9,000 years old. The swamp’s ecosystem evolved over time: it started as a freshwater marsh with pine and spruce; adapted to become a forest with beech, hemlock, and birch; and finally developed into a swamp forest of sphagnum moss and cypress, Atlantic white cedar (which the locals called juniper), and black gum. Sedge, grasses, and aquatic plants layered in the marsh, producing mats of peat that seal the swamp’s bottom.
Beginning 8,000 years ago, ancestors of the Chesapeake-area Native tribes hunted, fished, gathered shells, and foraged across the swamp. They cleared areas with fire and grew corn where the land was dry.
The Seventeenth Century
When British colonists arrived in 1607, they encountered Tsenacomoco (the Powhatan paramount chiefdom). Colonists surveyed the waterways of what became known as the Chesapeake Bay, inventorying the oysters and marine life, tree species, and suitable land for settlement. During the colonists’ first year on the land they called Virginia, Captain John Smith traveled east from Jamestown toward the mouth of what is now the James River, bearing south into a tributary they called the Nansemond River. From the river, he admired a hillock on which the Nansemond werowance, or chief lived. Some 850 Nansemond people lived along the river. Colonists demanded access to the land and its resources, and the two groups battled for control.
Three wars subsequently took place between British colonists and the people of Tsenacomoco, and the colonists decimated Powhatan’s people, including the Nansemond, and dispossessed them of their land. Per the terms of the 1646 treaty that ended the Anglo-Powhatan Wars, the remaining Nansemond surrendered their land along the river. The tribe scattered, pursuing different approaches to ensure their cultural and physical survival. One group converted to Christianity and relocated to the northwestern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp; the other eventually fled toward what became the Virginia-North Carolina border and merged with the historic Nottoway Tribe.
As permitted by the 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation, the Nansemond hunted and foraged along present-day Galberry Road in Chesapeake. They thrived in this area, in part because of white colonists’ fear of the swamp, which was derided as savage and believed to contain “miasmas,” or unhealthy air. Members of the Nansemond tribe with the surname of Bass have long populated this area, beginning with Elizabeth, daughter of a Nansemond chief, and British colonist John Bass, who married in 1638 and had eight children. In 1729, William Bass, likely a descendant of Elizabeth and John Bass, cited the Treaty of Middle Plantation in successfully claiming ownership of 103 acres of cleared swamp in Deep Creek.
Taming the Swamp
William Byrd conducted the first official survey of the swamp in 1728, although he did not enter it because, he claimed, “there was no Intelligence of this Terra Incognita to be got.” Instead, he sent assistants to brave the oozing depths and mosquitoes.
Thirty-five years later, in 1763, the General Assembly granted 40,000 acres of the wetland to the Adventurers for Draining the Dismal Swamp, later known as the Dismal Swamp Land Company, which was assembled by George Washington and his brother John Augustine Washington with the goal of draining the swamp to make it suitable for rice plantations and logging enterprises. They purchased fifty-four enslaved men, women, and children, who labored in the Dismal Town tract between Suffolk and the swamp’s western boundary, blending rural plantation life with a lumber camp. The enslaved community dug ditches and hauled logs, living in shacks made of juniper and cypress. The Washington and Jericho ditches, which date to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are surviving remnants of their labor.
The greatest feat and lasting source of frustration to those who attempted to tame the canal was the Dismal Swamp Canal. Because ditches have limited carrying capacity, those who sought to exploit the swamp sought to build an inland waterway that would allow barges and ships to travel between the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. To that end, in 1790, the two states approved the construction of the Dismal Swamp Canal to transport grain, tobacco, cotton, lumber, wood products like shingles and barrel staves from the swamp, and turpentine from North Carolina. But taming the swamp was no easy feat. Brutal working conditions such as heat, mosquitos, and entrenched root systems meant that laborers could extend the canal by a mere thirty feet per day, and the twenty-two-mile waterway from Deep Creek, Virginia, to South Mills, North Carolina, was not opened until 1805. Even after that time, dredging was constantly required. Locks hewn from the swamp’s timber ensured that the canal’s water table remained stable. The three-mile-long Feeder Ditch connected the canal with its source, Lake Drummond, to the west.
From the Feeder Ditch, Black and white boatmen traveled to Virginia and North Carolina’s port towns on flat-bottomed barges known as lighters. Many of those who labored on the canal were enslaved, though some, like members of the Hodges family, were free Black people. Though many of these boatmen’s voices have been lost to history, the narrative of Moses Grandy offers a glimpse into life on the canal and slavery in the swamp. The swamp also was home to enslaved people who had emancipated themselves from labor camps as well as nearby plantations and created communities beyond the reach of the white population. By the 1840s, the Dismal Swamp was widely known as a place of marronage and resistance to slavery.
Post–Civil War
The Civil War caused extensive damage around the perimeter of the Great Dismal Swamp. Union forces destroyed ditches and lock systems, and the Dismal Swamp Canal filled with silt and became impassable; ships lay waterlogged. Canal operations dwindled to a sluggish pace after the April 1862 Battle of South Mills, when Confederate forces thwarted Union attempts to destroy the locks at South Mills, North Carolina. One month later, Norfolk fell to the Union forces and many enslaved people, including maroons in the swamp, fled to the safety of Fort Monroe, where enslaved people could find freedom behind Union lines. While some African Americans remained in the area of the swamp, marronage dissipated following emancipation. For African Americans, emancipation offered social, economic, and political promise, including the opportunity to buy land. As Archibald Milteer, a Black man raised in nearby Suffolk, recalled, swampland “was about the only [land] around here” that African Americans could buy. “White folks wasn’t lettin’ Negroes have nothing,” he said. Many Black families on land surrounding the swamp practiced subsistence farming, while some Black women found domestic work in white people’s homes and Black men took jobs on the canal, as loggers, and at the nearby lumber mills.
Logging proved to be one of the postwar South’s most lucrative industries, as northern entrepreneurs descended on the region for its vast natural resources and the expansion of railroads allowed lumber to be shipped long distances. Many new lumber outfits emerged near the swamp, including the Wallace Company in present-day Chesapeake; the Richmond Cedar Works, which became well known for its ice cream freezers; the John L. Roper Lumber Company, which dominated the market with its “North Carolina Pine” from mills in Virginia and North Carolina; and the Franklin-based Camp Manufacturing Company, which purchased a large tract of land in the swamp from a successor of the Dismal Swamp Land Company that included Lake Drummond.
By the turn of the twentieth century, many residents of the area were employed by the lumber industry, enabling them to purchase land and send their children to school. The Cornland School of Chesapeake served Black children from at least 1903 to 1952.
Recreation, Conservation, and Hunting
Apart from the wage and subsistence labor of logging and farming, many poorer residents of the swamp supplemented their diets and income by trapping and hunting. The logging companies often granted hunters the right to hunt in the swamp and build cabins in it. Hunting traditions were often passed down through generations. “There are a few written accounts of our Tribe bear-hunting and wolf-trapping,” according to Nansemond chief emeritus Sam Bass. Hunting also was a popular activity for white sportsmen, as advertisements designed to appeal to northern tourists and wealthy southerners depicted the Great Dismal Swamp as an exotic wilderness rife with game. The logging industry, however, threatened traditional activities like hunting. With the rapid deforestation of the swampland, the peat that was usually submerged in water began to dry out, a problem that was exacerbated as logging companies expanded their systems of roads and ditches. Once deforested, the ground—a mix of peat, sand, and clay—baked under the sun and became brittle. The introduction of logging machinery that produced sparks, combined with the dry peat and logging debris, increased the risk of fires, which are a natural phenomenon in the swamp. In 1913, fires cost the Roper Lumber Company $100,000 and the Richmond Cedar Works $50,000. A 1925 fire engulfed $40,000 worth of lumber belonging to the Camp Manufacturing Company. On more than one occasion, the Norfolk Naval Yard needed to halt operations because of smoke from Dismal Swamp fires.
Swamp-based lumber companies collaborated with the U.S. Forest Service throughout the first half of the twentieth century to study the forest’s ecosystem and growth patterns. Corporate and federal entities became invested in scientific forestry—the idea that logging interests could profit in a sustainable way. In addition to these forestry studies, Norfolk County stationed a permanent forest warden at the swamp to surveil for fires. With the support of local landowners, the states of Virginia and North Carolina also installed three watchtowers to monitor fire conditions.
As the public became increasingly aware of the fire risk, locals also began to express concern for the swamp’s ecological well-being. Between 1933 and 1945, more than fifteen organizations—including chambers of commerce, state conservation commissions, and wildlife advocacy and civic groups—expressed support for the swamp’s designation as a game sanctuary, national forest, or national park. However, a 1934 National Park Service study found that “some of the swamps in more southern states will be found to be more picturesque and of more general interest than the Dismal Swamp.” The agent who conducted the study was disappointed by the amount of cutover land and the number of canals and logging roads.
Refuge Today
With much of its juniper and cypress harvested, the Great Dismal Swamp was less profitable than the piney woods of the deeper South, and Camp Manufacturing (renamed the Union Camp Corporation following a merger with the Union Bag and Paper Company 1956) began to consider what to do with its Dismal Swamp property. In 1973, the company gifted its land in the Great Dismal Swamp to the Nature Conservancy, which conveyed the land to the federal government—the largest corporate land donation for conservation in U.S. history. Local chapters of the League of Women Voters and the Izaak Walton League, a conservation organization, worked with the Nature Conservancy and Virginia and North Carolina representatives to convince the U.S. Congress of the swamp’s value, and a Department of the Interior study concluded that the Great Dismal Swamp held unique ecological and cultural merit. In 1974, the Great Dismal Swamp became a National Wildlife Refuge. Federal officials then began restoring the swamp’s ecosystems to restore biological diversity; one of the primary ongoing projects is water control to ensure that the swamp stays wet. Today, the Great Dismal Swamp is one of the most important wildlife refuges in the Mid-Atlantic region as a home or stopover to some forty-seven species of mammals, two-hundred birds, and ninety-six species of butterflies.
Politicians and journalists emphasized the refuge’s colonial connections to George Washington but made little mention of the area’s historic Black and Native communities, their work in the ditch-digging and logging camps, or their preference for life in the swamp over enslavement. But descendant communities held these memories of place-making and resistance. In 2021, the U.S. Congress announced a study to determine the feasibility of declaring the swamp a National Heritage Area—a place where historic, cultural, and natural resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally important landscape. This study resulted from the concerted effort of Black and Nansemond descendant communities to amplify the swamp’s cultural histories. If the Great Dismal Swamp becomes a National Heritage Area, partnerships between the National Park Service and private organizations will enhance cultural heritage and tourism opportunities. Regardless of the outcome, the Great Dismal Swamp fosters these layered memories as a refuge for people and wildlife.
