The Virginia State Lottery was going to hold a drawing on April 25, 1827, for the benefit of the Dismal Swamp Canal Co.

Whole tickets were $4, half-tickets $2, and a quarter-ticket could be purchased for $1. The grand prize was $10,000 and more than $100,000 in prize money was going to be awarded.

The lottery was part of an overall strategy by the company to raise funds to improve the then-22-mile-long Dismal Swamp Canal, a human-made waterway connecting the Albemarle Sound to the Chesapeake Bay that was completed in 1805.

Those improvements included creating the Northwest Canal, which was “built on the line of a waste ditch from the 1820s” and connected the Dismal Swamp Canal with the headwaters of the Northwest River. From there, the river empties into Currituck Sound on the coast, near the Virginia-North Carolina line, a 1973 report from the Canal Society noted.

Water to maintain the needed depth for navigation on the Dismal Swamp Canal and the Northwest River Canal was diverted from Lake Drummond in the Great Dismal Swamp. Those waters had traditionally drained though slow-moving creeks and rivers that emptied into Currituck Sound. That had been the case since opening in 1805.

The canal is often considered to be the oldest operating canal in the United States.

New Currituck Sound closed for the final time in 1828, changing the northern end of Currituck Sound from a saltwater to freshwater estuary, an event largely credited to the changes the Dismal Swamp Canal created in the flow of water.

“In 1828, the Atlantic inlets into the Currituck Sound closed due to the diversion of water in the Dismal Swamp and shifted the sound from salt-water to freshwater, upsetting the oyster and salt water fishing industries and changing commerce in the region,” Lago Mar on the Back Bay posted on their Facebook page on Dec. 31, 2025.

In a 1977 study “Coastal Processes and Resulting Forms of Sediment Accumulations Currituck Spit,” the authors note that “The completion of the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1805 undoubtedly also played a role in the closing of New Currituck Inlet.”

But coastal geologist Dr. Stan Riggs is skeptical that the Dismal Swamp Canal caused the inlet to close. The inlets of Currituck Sound are “ephemeral,” he said.

“They open in a storm, and they’re good for a while, and then they shoal back down,” he told Coastal Review. “It’s not the inside waters like down in the Pamlico. The inside waters there (in the Pamlico) play a big part in controlling the inlets and outlets, but up there (in Currituck Sound), there’s not enough water mass to build any kind of a storm surge on the inside.”

There are other factors arguing against the Dismal Swamp Canal closing the inlet that Riggs points to, as well.

With relatively little volume of water surging through the inlet, “it’s mostly the dynamics from outside that are driving that,” Riggs said. “One storm can move sand south, another storm will come along and move sand north. There’s a push and a pull that’s going on and up there. It’s mostly the dynamics of the ocean that are dictating what’s happening.”

And the ocean is getting sand from “a big sand pile off the mouth of Chesapeake Bay” Riggs said. “One of the reasons that we have so much sand up there in the first place is you have to have a source, and that source is the offshore (sand). That inlet closed because nor’easter storms were driving the Chesapeake sands to the northern barrier island.”

Neither the Old Currituck Inlet that would have been on the border of North Carolina and Virginia, nor the New Currituck Inlet just south of Knotts Island were especially useful for shipping.

There was some traffic through inlets for a short time, but William Byrd wrote in 1728 in his “History of the Dividing Line,” that “Navigation is a little difficult, and fit only for Vessels that draw no more than ten feet Water.”

Currituck County had a customs house to handle shipping arriving through New Currituck Inlet, but as author Meg Malvasi wrote in a 2010 “Historic and Architectural Resources of Currituck County 1790-1958” produced for the National Park Service, “One historian described the port as ‘of little consequence, for the few vessels which put in there were small, and the cargoes inconsiderable.’ Whenever one came to the port to unload goods, the port master would simply be there to greet the vessel.’”

The customs house closed in 1819 when Congress did not fund the location.

Even with either Currituck Inlet open, farmers and merchants in northeastern North Carolina lacked access to major seaports, and a canal linking the Outer Banks sounds with Norfolk, Virginia, had been discussed even before the American Revolution.

The earliest ventures were more concerned with draining the Great Dismal Swamp to create arable land than creating a canal. George Washington was a principal in the Dismal Swamp Co. formed in 1763 “for the purpose of taking up and draining a large Body of Land called the Dismal Swamp.” 

The venture failed, but Washington held on to his shares.

After the American Revolution, he and the other shareholders made a second attempt at draining the Dismal Swamp. That, too, failed. But, now familiar with Lake Drummond and how the waters moved through the swamp, he wrote in 1784 to North Carolina politician Hugh Williamson that “I have been long satisfied of the practicability of opening a communication between the rivers which empty into Albemarle Sound (thro’ Drummonds Pond) & the waters of Elizabeth or Nansemund Rivers.”

A doctor and scientist, Williamson, after the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777, fled to Edenton where he was elected to the state legislature and eventually sent to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Edenton was an critical port of entry in the 18th century and, according to a 1969 National Register of Historic Places document, Williamson “owned ships that traded profitably between Edenton and the West Indies.” A canal connecting Elizabeth City on the Pasquotank River with Norfolk would draw trade away from Edenton to the much better ports of Virginia.

Nonetheless, Williamson was “the primary advocate of the canal in North Carolina,” historian Mathew Shaeffer wrote about the Dismal Swamp Canal for the North Carolina History Project.

His support was important. The Dismal Swamp Canal Co. needed permission from Virginia and North Carolina to move the project forward. Virginia chartered the company in 1787, and it took three years for North Carolina to follow suit, but in 1790, the state chartered the company allowing construction to begin.

It took a while.

Work did not begin until 1793 on the poorly funded project to create the canal connecting South Mills in North Carolina and Deep Creek, now part of Chesapeake, Virginia.

Most of the work to cut the canal by hand was almost all done by enslaved laborers.

The conditions to dig a ditch through the tangle of swamp vegetation were horrific: extreme heat, venomous snakes, constant danger of flooding, and ice and cold in the winter.

Because the labor force was predominantly enslaved individuals who were often rented from their owners, there are no known records of the deaths that occurred while the canal was being built.

Originally conceived to be 32 feet wide and 8 feet deep, engineering for the project was primitive, French noble Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wrote after a visit to the canal.

“What must appear surprising, is that, for this canal which already seems in such a state of forwardness, no levels have been taken. It is not yet known what number of locks may be necessary, and even whether any will be requisite,” he observed.

Even after opening to traffic in 1805, the canal did not match the original concept. When the canal was filled and the water was 8 feet deep, larger boats could not use it, although the water was sufficient for shallow-draft barges.

“That would be enough to let the residents of northeastern North Carolina get their produce and lumber to market,” David Walbert wrote for Anchor, a North Carolina online history resource.

Improvements were made, though. The War of 1812 “increased the desire to have a ‘back door’ shipping route between Virginia and North Carolina,” Shaeffer wrote, noting the canal “was not able to provide an adequate alternative route.”

Before the war ended in 1815, the “canal was expanded, and the first recorded passage of a vessel other than a flatboat occurred in June 1814,” Shaeffer continued.

Improvements continued to be made. On May 13, 1830, the Roanoke Advocate in Halifax wrote, “The interesting spectacle of the launching of a new  boat, was exhibited on Saturday … in Portsmouth. Though small, being only about 65 feet length on deck, the plan and purpose of this boat render her an object no little importance; she is intended to ply between this place and Elizabeth City via the Dismal Swamp Canal, and to admit of her passing through the canal without injury to the banks she is to be propelled by paddles in the rear … The name of this handsome appendage to the navigation of our port is the Lady of the Lake.”

The Lady of the Lake was the first steam-powered boat to ply the waters of the canal.

The Dismal Swamp Canal, though, was facing increased competition. Railroads in North Carolina and Virginia offered faster transportation of goods. In 1859 the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, or A&C Canal, provided deeper water and a more direct route to Virginia ports for North Carolina goods.

Union and Confederate forces fought for control of the canal during the Civil War, and although the North wrested control from the Confederacy in 1862, the South “did benefit from extensive smuggling via the canal during the rest of the war,” according to the Virginia Places Dismal Swamp Canal webpage.

For a brief period beginning in the 1890s, following upgrades by Lake Drummond Canal & Water Co., which purchased the canal in 1892, the Dismal Swamp Canal carried more freight than the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal. With the federal government purchasing the A&C to create the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, the fate of the Dismal Swamp Canal was sealed.

As with part of the Intracoastal, use of the A&C was free, and the Lake Drummond Canal & Water Co. did not have the resources to maintain its canal as well as the federal government could.

The federal government purchased the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1929 and it is currently maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Today, the canal is part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway that stretches along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast states, and it measures 19 miles long, 60 feet wide and at a controlling depth of 9 feet, according to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The National Park Service is asking the public to provide input for a study to determine the feasibility and suitability of designating a future national heritage area that includes the Great Dismal Swamp and other areas in North Carolina and Virginia.

A 60-day comment period for the Great Dismal Swamp National Heritage Area Feasibility Study began last week and continues through May 19. More information about the study and survey questions are available online.

To inform the public about the study and solicit comments, the park service has scheduled virtual meetings for 4 p.m. Tuesday, noon Wednesday and 6 p.m. Wednesday. Links to the meetings will be posted beforehand on the project website.

Officials said public input “is both necessary and critical to this study. The study team seeks to learn more about the region from the people who know it best.”

Feedback will help inform the work of assessing the Great Dismal Swamp study area as a potential national heritage area, officials continued.

The study was authorized in 2023 in a measure that identified Camden, Currituck, Gates, and Pasquotank counties in North Carolina and the Virginia cities of Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Suffolk and Isle of Wight County.

The study is to assess the evidence of community support, including businesses, residents, nonprofit organizations and government agencies.

“The study will gather and assess the region’s unique and important American stories, how they can be experienced by the public and how a coordinating entity could organize a potential National Heritage Area if Congress were to designate one,” officials said.

The study is expected to run through 2026. The study’s assessment, along with any recommendations from the Interior secretary, will be reported to Congress.

Comments may be submitted by visiting the project website, clicking “Links” on the left, and then “Open for Comment;” or by mail to National Park Service, Denver Service Center, Attn: Great Dismal Swamp NHA / Julie Bell, 1 Federal Center, Building 50, P.O. Box 25287, Denver, CO 80225.

Of the $7.6 million awarded last month to state-managed lands, $600,000 goes to Dismal Swamp State Park in Camden County to construct an equipment storage building.

The funding from the Parks and Recreation Trust Fund for fiscal year 2024-25 was allocated by the nine-member Parks and Recreation Authority at their November meeting. North Carolina State Parks and Recreation announced the awards Thursday.

Barnes Sutton, representing Brunswick County, was reappointed to a three-year term and was sworn in during the meeting. Sutton is director of economic and community development director for Leland.

“Funding from the Parks and Recreation Trust Fund to expand and enhance state parks plays a vital role in preserving North Carolina’s remarkable natural areas, while also offering outdoor recreation and educational experiences throughout the state,” said D. Reid Wilson, secretary of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. “We are grateful for the continued financial support from the General Assembly and Governor Roy Cooper.”

Located at the northeast border of North Carolina and Virginia, the Dismal Swamp State Park offers hiking, biking, paddling, fishing and birdwatching opportunities, access to the Great Dismal Swamp, “the largest remaining swamp in the eastern United States,” and the 22-mile Dismal Swamp Canal, according to the state parks system.

Including the building to house trail maintenance and canal system equipment at Dismal Swamp State Park, $6.4 million of the $7.6 million in funds will go to renovations and other projects at Carvers Creek State Park in Cumberland County, Stone Mountain State Park in Wilkes County, Elk Knob State Park in Ashe County, and Bob’s Creek State Natural Area in McDowell County.

The two land acquisition projects totaling $1.23 million will add 2,410 acres to the Wilderness Gateway State Trail in McDowell County and 1.7 acres to the William B. Umstead State Park in Wake County.

In addition, $2.2 million will go to repairs and preventative maintenance at parks throughout the system.

The state receives 65% of the fund’s annual appropriation and revenue for state parks projects and projects at the DuPont Recreational State Forest. North Carolina State Parks is under the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which manages more than 100 locations across the state.

Coastal Review features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast.

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Note from the author: I have written this as kind of an online history exhibit. The story starts with a short introduction, then features more than 40 annotated photographs and other images illustrating the last decades of an ancient swamp forest that was once located on the North Carolina coast. 

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For quite some time, I have been collecting historical photographs, maps, and manuscripts that document the lumber boomtowns and logging camps of the Pungo River and its hinterlands in the late 19th century and the early part of the 20th century.

After the Civil War, lumber companies bought thousands of square miles of forestlands on the North Carolina coast. As if out of nowhere, scores of lumber mill towns sprang up virtually overnight (only to vanish, most of them, when the forest was gone).

The lumber companies reshaped the land, our most important towns, and even some of our most remote islands.

Logging camps seemed to be everywhere. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles of railroads were built to move logging machinery into even the most remote swamp forests, to haul logs to mills, and to carry lumber after it was milled to northern seaports.

Canals were built to drain swamp forests. Lumber barges and schooners crowded local waterways.

For the sake of building America, coastal forests that had stood for centuries, and sometimes millennia, vanished.

I do not know to what I can compare that part of North Carolina’s coastal history. It was a frontier world, often almost lawless, dangerous, destructive, and, for some, liberating, all at once.

Thousands of people left farms and fishing boats and their old lives to make a go of it in the mills and logwoods.

And they came from all over, not just from local towns and villages, but Appalachian hollows, Great Lakes logging camps, and New York City tenement houses.

They included men and women with the scars of slavery still on their backs, Outer Banks fishing families, and immigrants fresh from Ellis Island, many of them speaking barely a word of English — all made their way to the lumber mill towns and logging camps.

In this collection of historical images today, I am focusing on the lumber boom in just one corner of the North Carolina coast, the Pungo and the forests within about 15 miles of its shores.

But I hope that by so doing, we can at least get a glimpse of the size and scale of the lumber boom throughout the North Carolina coast, what it was like for the people who lived through it, and how it transformed our communities, as well as our land and waters.

Rising in the central part of Washington County, in the remnants of what local people today often call the “Big Swamp,” the Pungo, an Algonquin Indian word, is only 35 miles long.

In its northernmost reaches, the river flows today through a canal that was dug in the 1950s to drain the farmlands west of Pungo Lake and what is now the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

But then the river grows wild again. It meanders south, passing along breathtakingly beautiful cane brakes and marshlands until it opens up into a broad bay, an estuary really, that eventually folds itself into the Pamlico River and the Pamlico Sound.

Today it is a quiet, peaceful place. Belhaven, the only town on the river, has a population of less than 1,500. Pantego (another Algonquin name), the only town on any of the river’s tributaries, has maybe a few more than 200 residents.

It is a place of rural byways and little crossroads: when you leave Belhaven, you can go 25 miles in any direction — east, west, north, or south — and never hit a stoplight.

But as you will see here, the Pungo was once a very different place.

As you look through these old photographs and yellowed maps, please know that I am, as people sometimes say, a “lifetime learner.” I would always welcome hearing from anyone who might know more about any of these images.

In studying the Pungo’s lumber boom, one thing is very clear to me though: whatever other stories I tell, anything I write will also be an elegy. It just has to be.

The Pungo River was once the heart of one of America’s great natural wonders. When you left the river’s shores, you entered a vast wilderness, a swamp forest that covered hundreds of square miles and was so large and so foreboding that it had long been a refuge for the local Algonquin people, fugitive slaves, and other outcasts.

For those who care about our natural heritage, it was a marvel: the East Dismal Swamp, as I am going to call it,  was home to ancient and majestic groves of bald cypress, some of the country’s largest stands of Atlantic white cedar (juniper), and pocosin wetlands of a size and grandeur found in few other places on Earth.

But especially between 1880 and 1920, the logging companies and land developers did not just log the Pungo’s old-growth forests: they erased them.

Using railroads and new kinds of machinery, they logged even the most remote corners of the East Dismal. Then, especially in the pocosins, they dug great canals and vast networks of ditches to drain the land. When the peat soils dried out, they then burned what was left of the forest and the peat beds again and again.

They did that until the East Dismal Swamp — or whatever you want to call that great swamp wilderness — was gone.

If you visit the site of the East Dismal today, you will find only a broad, open plain and seeming endless farm fields, stretching, in many places almost treeless, as far as the eye can see.

You might think that you were in Kansas or Nebraska, if it were not for the miles and miles of canals and ditches.

History is for me, when all is said and done, about remembrance and recalling the ancestors.

And through them, coming to know ourselves.

But there are also times when I think that we should remember lost places, out of respect for them and maybe for our own good, too. I think that this is one of those times.

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Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state’s coast as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

SUFFOLK, Va. – William Byrd, a Colonial-era surveyor and satirist who in 1728 established the dividing line between southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina, is credited with blessing the Great Dismal Swamp with its evocative and ominous name.

The million or so acres, he wrote, had air “infected by malignant vapours” rising from “mire and filthiness.” It was, he declared, a “miserable morass” of spongey land, twisted vines and thick undergrowth.

“They started at the Atlantic Ocean and ran into an impenetrable wall of vegetation,” Chris Lowie, the manager of the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, related in a recent interview. “And he didn’t even go through it. He told the crew it was the most god-awful dismal place, not fit for anybody.”

Byrd, who died in 1744 at 70, wrote several publications, the “Dividing Line Histories,” “Description of the Dismal, with the Proposal to drain the swamp,” and the somewhat satirical “The Secret History of the Line, “providing in-depth details of his impressions, as well as insights about early 18th-century history.

But three centuries later, Byrd’s vivid assessment of the Colonial-era swamplands, though a nonstarter for today’s tourism brochures, fortunately is part of the reason the Dismal Swamp is currently being considered for designation as a National Heritage Area.

The legislation that directs the secretary of interior to conduct a feasibility study has been passed in Congress and added to the study list, Lowie said. A report with recommendations is due to Congress within three years.

National Heritage Areas, which are administered by the National Park Service, engage communities in collaborative heritage preservation activities that are relevant to its needs and interests. Programs are community-driven and focused on conservation, preservation and economic development.

It is also a unique ecosystem, deserving of appreciation as well as protection.

The Great Dismal Swamp can boast of a cypress and cedar forest where at least 47 species of mammals and more than 200 species of birds breed or stop by during their migration, according to a February 2021 blog on The Wilderness Society website.

In addition to its prolific populations of biting insects, it also attracts dozens of species of butterfly. The swamp also harbors venomous snakes like rattlesnakes and water moccasins, but the same tannic acid from the cypress and gum trees that darkens the water also makes the water exceptionally pure. And its mucky peat soil holds tons of carbon dioxide, helping to mitigate carbon emissions in the atmosphere, a prime cause of climate change.

“National Heritage Areas are places where historic, cultural, and natural resources combine to form cohesive, nationally important landscapes,” according to its website. “Unlike national parks, National Heritage Areas are large lived-in landscapes.”

At about 113,000 acres, the refuge is the largest remaining intact area of the once-vast Dismal Swamp.

Historically, the swamp ranged from the James River to the Albemarle Sound, over to the North Landing River and North River. In North Carolina, it stretched over Currituck, Camden, Pasquotank and Gates counties. And in Virginia, it encompassed Chesapeake, Suffolk, Isle of Wight County, Portsmouth and Norfolk.

As it turns out, the swamp, despite and because of its unique peatland ecosystem, was a hub of activity from the earliest years of our nation. The Dismal, as it was known informally, was a place that reflected the best and worst of an evolving America, a place of refuge, forced labor, entrepreneurship, commerce.

“Thousands of African-American Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and enslaved African-American laborers lived there in a variety of communities and, in the process, created their own social and economic world between 1607 and 1860,” American University anthropology professor Daniel Sayers was quoted as saying in the March/April 2015 edition of Humanities, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Maroons were enslaved people who escaped and created small townships within the swamp, taking advantage of the swamp’s undesirable conditions that hid them from Europeans. Historians estimate that as many as 50,000 freedom-seekers lived in the swamp. Later, the Dismal became one of the few water stops along the Underground Railroad that helped the enslaved to escape to free northern states. The refuge was the first to be named to the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program in 2003.

And George Washington slept there — numerous times. As one of 12 wealthy Virginians to form the Great Dismal Swamp Co. in 1763, he was instrumental in building the nation’s first canal, now the oldest operating canal, to drain the land for farming and real estate investment.

“During a time of soil depletion and scarcity of seaboard land, the Dismal Swamp — one of the last and largest expanses on the East Coast to resist settlement — promised the advantages of fertility and easy access to navigable water,” according to an article about the company published at mountvernon.org.

Washington, one of three managers for the company, was charged with securing titles and buying the enslaved people who dug the ditches and produced cedar shingles through the 1770s, according to the website. But goals of draining the swamp and growing hemp to export had failed.

After the War for Independence, Washington helped reconvene the partners. Despite the lack of success on engineering drainage, the effort eventually led to Washington devising a plan with Patrick Henry and others for the Dismal Swamp Co. to build a canal through the swamp to link the Chesapeake Bay and Albemarle Sound. Construction began in 1793 and was completed in 1805, more than five years after Washington’s death in December 1799.

Meanwhile, the company gave up on plans to drain the swamp and turned its focus to timber, leading to its first profitable year in 1810. Four years later, it was in business as the Dismal Swamp Land Co.

On Washington’s birthday in 1973, the Union Camp Corp., a forest products company, donated 49,097 acres of swamp to The Nature Conservancy, which then donated the land to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The refuge was officially established Aug. 30, 1974.  But timber businesses are still thriving; International Paper operates its plant about 30 miles from the refuge headquarters in Suffolk, Lowie said.

As far as national wildlife refuges go, the Dismal Swamp is rather low-key. It has no fancy visitor center; but its 75,000 annual visitors can do self-guided tours with the help of interpretive signs and kiosks, including at the five different trailheads. The refuge is crisscrossed by 150 miles of ditches and road, of which about 60 miles are open for public use.

The popular annual bird festival, which is planned for April 29, attracts birders from all over the world, Lowie said. Planned activities include guided bird walks, bus tours and nature walks, as well as numerous family and educational offerings.

Not far from the refuge, the Suffolk Visitor Center has a Dismal Swamp exhibit, he said. And Chesapeake is currently building the Great Dismal Swamp Historic Village. It’s going to be a city park, with a visitor center there. The first Black school in Chesapeake has been moved to the site, he said, and they’ll have mockups of what a maroon camp looked like.

In addition, the refuge is starting to make plans for its 50th anniversary Aug. 30, 2024. But that date is inconveniently during the height of the swamp’s notoriously vicious bug population.

“So we’ll probably call all our events next year an anniversary event,” Lowrie said.  “Yellow flies are the biggest issue — unless you’re out on the lake.”

Lowie said he believes it would beneficial to all stakeholders to have the Dismal Swamp join the other 62 designated National Heritage Areas that have been designated from 1984 through 2023. The first were National Heritage Area Illinois and the Michigan Canal National Heritage Area.

“I think it’ll bring more visitation here,” he said. “It will bring light to the significance of this landscape here of a dismal swamp.”

But it would also bring more attention to the profound cultural and historical significance of the Dismal Swamp, Lowie said.

“That may bring a different user group to say, ‘Oh wow, let me check this out,’” he said. “It should benefit the area by bringing more education, more outreach and hopefully more stewardship and protection.”

And the Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge would be right in the thick of it, serving as a hub.

“Maybe we’ll have a visitor center one day,” Lowie added.

The Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City will welcome next month J. Brent Morris, author of “Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp,” for a special lecture and booksigning.

The event with Morris, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort, is set for 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 17.

The special History for Lunch program is being offered both in-person and through Zoom. Register in advance through the museum’s Facebook page or website to receive a link to attend the lecture virtually.

Thousands of maroons, or people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers, established new lives of freedom in the Great Dismal Swamp. Morris draws from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined in the Great Dismal Swamp, which covers almost 2.000 square miles and is in Virginia and North Carolina.

“This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War,” according to UNC Press, which published the book.

The virtual program is supported by Southern Bank of Elizabeth City.

Part of a history series examining each of North Carolina’s 20 coastal counties.

The Albemarle region is known for its historical legacy, beautiful natural areas and quaint architecture. It is also mostly a quiet, rural area with small towns and limited economic activity.

The quietest, most rural county in the region by far is Camden County. It is known not for its buildings or major historic events but for its canal and its swamp.

While it does not have the tourist sites of Edenton or the industry of Elizabeth City, Camden County is still a fascinating part of North Carolina’s oldest region.

Camden County was part of the Albemarle, the first area permanently settled by the English in North Carolina. Its earliest settlers came south from Virginia and purchased land from the Yeopim Native Americans.

The county was originally the eastern part of Pasquotank County. The state legislature formed Camden County in 1777 because of the “width of Pasquotank River, and the Difficulty of passing the same, especially in boisterous weather,” which prevented some residents from reaching the courthouse easily.

As noted by David Leroy Corbitt, Camden County’s general boundaries were the Pasquotank River to the west, the North River to the east, and the Virginia border.

One sizable house still remains from this early period, Milford, near the county seat of Camden. Milford was constructed in 1746 by John Ivey, a local planter mentioned in William Byrd’s “History of the Dividing Line.” It is one of the largest pre-1750 houses in the state, made of brick with two stories. Milford is known for its rare, gable design pattern, which, according to H.G. Jones, was only found in one other colonial house in the South.

Like the Old Brick House in Elizabeth City and the Cupola House in Edenton, Milford was definitely a mansion during its day. The vast majority of colonists in Camden County lived in much simpler dwellings, at first log cabins and then one-story plank houses.

Camden County’s economy has always been defined by the Great Dismal Swamp, which makes up its upper half. The swamp is one of the largest on the eastern seaboard, comprising more than 100,000 acres in North Carolina and Virginia.

Byrd’s expedition was one of the first European groups to encounter and cross the swamp. Byrd wrote that the swamp did not contain most of the fanciful creatures that locals told stories about, but that it “had one Beauty, however, that delighted the Eye, tho’ at the Expense of all the other Senses: the Moisture of the Soil preserves a continual Verdure, and makes every Plant an Evergreen, but at the same time the foul Damps ascend without ceasing, corrupt the Air, and render it unfit for Respiration.”

As its edges were settled in the 18th and 19th centuries, the swamp became a source of shingle production. It was also a home for runaway enslaved people from North Carolina and Virginia.

They formed self-sufficient maroon communities, sometimes interacting with whites near the canals and edges of the swamp and often staying entirely away from white society.

Recent scholarship has unearthed several of their communities and has started to understand the extent of African American settlement in the region, according to a 2016 Smithsonian Magazine profile.

The early 19th century was a prosperous period for Camden County. It was the site of the Port of Camden up to the 1820s. By 1860, the county’s enslaved population was 42% of its total population, the 27th highest total in the state according to the Hergesheimer map. Many of these slaves worked in shingle production or on small farms growing foodstuffs such as corn and wheat, an 1860 census document states.

The Great Dismal Swamp Canal, which opened in 1805 and was widened in 1829 with the use of slave labor, passed through the county. The canal connected the Albemarle region with Norfolk and the Chesapeake Bay.

One of the few sizable communities in Camden County grew up along the canal.

South Mills was formed in the 1830s and named after mills that used water from a canal spillway for power. It was the site of a Civil War battle in 1862, where Confederates prevented a Union attempt to destroy the Great Dismal Swamp Canal’s locks, a 2012 Virginian-Pilot article explains.

The only other community with any size in Camden County is the county seat of Camden. Established as Jonesborough in 1792 according to the North Carolina Gazetteer, it is located on the Pasquotank River.

Two early public buildings remain in Camden from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Camden County Courthouse is an 1847 Greek Revival structure with four columns and a sizable porch. There is also the Camden County Jail, a brick building completed in 1910 that now houses offices and a museum.

Camden County remained one of the smallest and most lightly populated counties in North Carolina throughout the 19th and 20th century. In 1900, its population was only 5,474, a paltry total that made it less populated than 16 of the state’s towns. But a number of remarkable individuals still hailed from the swampy northeast county, many of whom were African American.

Julian Williams escaped from slavery to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War, while Moses Grandy purchased his freedom in the 1820s, wrote a narrative of his life, and later became an influential abolitionist.

Later on, Mary Elliott Hill, 1907-1969, born in South Mills, became a notable chemist who published dozens of papers and formulated processes important in plastic production.

Today, Camden County remains one of the most rural, sparsely populated counties in the state. It has the fifth smallest population in the state and still no incorporated towns.

But these circumstances may change in the next decade or so. Elizabeth City continues to grow on Camden County’s western border. There is a chance that its growth will jump the Pasquotank River and turn Camden into a bedroom community.

In addition, a new highway-widening project of US 17 and the proposed mid-Currituck bridge could bring thousands of travelers every year through Camden County on their way to the Outer Banks.

Time will tell if Camden County will become a waypoint for tourists or if it will retain the rural character that has defined it for the past three centuries.

President Trump on Tuesday signed into law a bipartisan bill that will tap energy revenues to address a $12 billion backlog of maintenance projects on federal lands, including more than $459 million in national parks in North Carolina.

Introduced in 2019 by the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the Great American Outdoors Act also makes funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanent. Earlier this year, the Trump administration had proposed significant cuts to the fund.

Republican 3^rd District Congressman Greg Murphy voted for the bill, which the House passed July 22.

Murphy’s office noted in a press release in July that Cape Hatteras National Seashore will receive $49,834,106, and Cape Lookout National Seashore will receive $27,718,515 as a result of the legislation.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund supports national forests, refuges and parks, including the Croatan National Forest, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge, Currituck National Wildlife Refuge, Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge, Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge, Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, Swan Quarter National Wildlife Refuge, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Cape Lookout National Seashore, the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and the Wright Brothers National Memorial.

The bill establishes the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund to support deferred maintenance projects on federal lands. For the next five years, an amount equal to half of energy development revenues from oil, gas, coal and alternative or renewable energy development on federal lands and waters is to be deposited into the fund, up to $1.9 billion for any year.

The fund must be used for priority deferred maintenance projects in specified systems that are administered by the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Education.

Interior Secretary David L. Bernhardt announced Tuesday that entrance fees paid by those visiting lands managed by the department would be waived Wednesday. Bernhardt also announced that Aug. 4 will be designated “Great American Outdoors Day,” a fee-free day each year to commemorate the signing of the act. Fees such as camping and cabin rentals and others will remain in effect.