This place is not nearly as great, dismal, or swampy as it once was.
In 1763, long before he became president, George Washington became an investor in the Dismal Swamp Company. The goal? Cut down trees, sell the logs, drain the swamp, turn it into farmland, and grow hemp. So the company used enslaved people to dig ditches and cut shingles from the cedar trees in the 1760s and 1770s.
But the swamp didn’t drain, and the peat soil, which was made up of decomposed twigs and plants, wasn’t actually all that great for farming. Eventually Washington gave up on the Dismal Swamp Company and sold off his shares in 1793, around halfway through his presidency.
In the long run, most of the land was drained and the cypress and cedar timber was sold off. As of 2022, the size of the swamp itself was only about 750 square miles across North Carolina and Virginia, a far cry from what it had been. So what happened to the rest of it? Well, big chunks of it did become farmland. Other parts are now neighborhoods in Suffolk, Norfolk, and Chesapeake, Virginia. You can see on a Google Map where the drainage ditches used to be in the Culpepper Landing neighborhood, which sits right next to the refuge and the canal.
Today, most of the Great Dismal Swamp looks like really thick woods. The trails in the park are mostly straight gravel roads, cut in next to some of the bigger drainage ditches.
That’s the initial view I got from the passenger seat of Adam Carver’s pickup truck back in 2017. Carver was (and still is) the park’s superintendent. We stopped the car and walked into the brush, which was incredibly thick and thorny. We swatted away yellow biting flies. I pulled at least four ticks off of me. A vine tangled itself around the gun strapped to Carver’s belt. I asked if the swamp has ever actually pulled the pistol out of his holster. “A couple times,” he said.
It took us 10 minutes to travel maybe 50 yards through the brush.
Of course, it’s not all gravel roads and thick brush. In another spot, Carver showed me a mature stand of extremely tall Atlantic white cedar trees, at least 200 years old. They like the soggy peat soil, which felt spongy under my feet. After standing for a few moments, I’d sunken a few inches into the ground.
In the past, that peat soil has become a big problem. In August 2011, a lightning strike set off a huge wildfire on the Virginia side of the swamp. The dried out peat soil was extremely flammable, and the fire basically burned down into the ground and created a gigantic six-foot-deep hole that butted up against the state line.
The fire burned for three months, and it’s easy to see its remnants, even years later. Water has filled in the hole, which means the northern edge of the state park looks like a lake full of brush and ghost trees. “That peat soil is organic leaf matter and decaying trees,” Carver said. “It takes millions and millions of years to produce it, and in a matter of three months, a fire comes through, and it’s gone.”
In other parts, the state park and the wildlife refuge are trying to make the swamp swampy again. At one point, Carver showed me one of four metal dams in the park. He and the other rangers could put in metal slats, block up ditches, and hold water back. Black liquid pooled up behind one of them and a little bit flowed over the top and created foam thick enough to pick up. It looked like a Guinness-filled bubble bath.
You know what you don’t see a lot of in the Dismal Swamp State Park? People. During our deep trip into the swamp by truck, the only people we saw were a few hikers within a half mile of the ranger station and visitor center, which sit on the other side of the main canal. Unless you’re already heading up U.S. Highway 17, it’s fairly remote. “In my opinion, that’s kinda the beauty of the Dismal Swamp,” Carver said. “You can go out there and not see anybody. And that’s what you need, to get away from everything.”
Jeremy Markovich writes about North Carolina curiosities at NC Rabbit Hole, subscribe at NCRabbitHole.com. This column is syndicated by Beacon Media, please contact info@beaconmedianc.org with feedback or questions.