THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

AMERICAN HISTORY

THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

The Great Dismal Swamp, the middle of it at 36 degree latitude, within the limits

of northern North Carolina and south east Virginia, the eastern edge bordering on Currituck Sound and western edge on Virginia's James River. It's background is that it is a supposedly forbidden place.

Therefore it is of interest that the swamp is not altoghter dismal and during certain periods of the year it is picturesque and beautiful and is not dangerous nor unpleasant to visit although it has

resisted taming by hand of man for more than three centuries.

The purchase of it's Dismal Swamp Canal by the United States government during the

George Washington 1932 National Bi-Centennial brought it into the limelight again.

George Washington's great engineering feat was his brain child, the canal, 40 years in the building, which he surveyed and his woodsmen axes conquered the vast morass for the first and last time with spade and wheelbarrow.

Great Dismal Swamp is a wilderness primeval in between the sites of the English settlement ventures, Roanoke Island and Jamestown. It is captivating, studied, written about.

Within ear shot of the Norfolk area's industrial center bears, wildcats, deer, runaway farm stock,

roam about as they did three centuries ago, all within the area which hear the firing of the Navy

Yard's “nine o'clock gun”. Spring and fall are the most desirable times to view it's scenery.

The bitter sweet amber Juniper water gives the swamp it's moisture. Fills the streams and ponds and Great Drummond lake at the center. Lake Drummond has no inlet and one must row up hill to reach it. The swamp has it own odor in the spring, new born flowers and foliage.

The swamp is in the form of a vast oval, 30 miles in breadth, 50 mile in length, the lake of

20 mile circumference in the center, the ridged land around, full of cypress trees growing thick and lofty. Dry summers bring fire, one fire burnt many weeks and the swamp beast forsook to the many surrounding plantations within ninety miles or more.

Abstract: Maryville, Kansas Evening Democrat, August 1890, Pennsylvania Packet, Philadelphia, August 1790, a Wilmington Evening Journal, June 12, 1930.

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