Travels: The Great Dismal Swamp and a Rebellion

Last April, while visiting the Virginia coast for my wife's family reunion (more on that below), I held out for the one thing that I wanted to do — to see at least some of the The Great Dismal Swamp.

Despite the name, no Goths were spotted.

How could I resist that name? I have been reading about it for years. I kind of half expected that it would summon the Goth kids to drift through the cypress swamps, but evidently they prefer urban graveyards.

Even though the  112,000-acre Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and the adjacent Dismal Swamp State Park in North Carolina (14,432 acres) cover the heart of it, much is gone, drained for agriculture and logging. Part of that draining started in 1763, directed by one George Washington, who had enormous land holdings in Virginia, at least on paper. Canals and railroads were built to bring out timber.

The refuge was established in the mid-1970s on land donated by timber companies, and restoration work has been underway since then. North Carolina's park was created about the same time, with assistance from The Nature Conservancy.

M. and I tossed our day packs in the rented Prius and set out. Disappointment: the visitor center was closed, on a weekday. So no trail maps, natural history exhibits, or whatever the USFWS was hiding in there. No explanation was given online or by a sign posted on the door — just  closed.

Instead, we strolled a level path through a grove of loblolly pines. If I remember right, these were planted in the 1970s, so they have done well in fifty years. They are known for fast growth.

But the swamp! So we studied the signage at the parking lot and set out on a road toward the center. There is a large, fishable lake there, Lake Drummond, but since we were staying adjacent to Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, we were not looking for big water.

This was more like it: a boardwalk. While a few old cypressess remained -- they had been heavily logged -- most of what we saw were younger trees planted in the 1980s in wetland reshaped with heavy equipment. But they are doing well.

Early April was a good time to visit. The temperatures were mild (in the 50s F.), the sun shone, and there were no mosquitoes.

More loblolly pines on a nature trail.

The center tree is one of few old-growth cypress.

 

Cypress marsh.

Another walk took us down a straight-line former railroad beside a drainage canal.

Can't have a swamp without basking turtles.

Red maple is also common in the Great Dismal Swamp.

Mostly zebra swallowtails, I think.

We could have done more, but it was time to head back to the coast and rendezvous with the siblings-in-law for a seafood dinner in Norfolk, and since I came all this way, I was ready for more softshell crab.

Two of M.'s siblings have moved to Virgina over the years, but whose ancestors got off the boat somewhere along the James River? Mine. 

So I detoured another day through Surry County, on the more rural south bank, to take in the sights and snack on local peanuts, whose packaging indirectly commemorates Bacon's Rebellion (1676–77).

Go back and read it about it, and the rhetoric may ring a bell: "The coastal elites don't care about us and our problems! We're fed up! We're marching on the capital!" 

And so they did, torching the House of Burgesses in Jamestown, which was still the colonial capital.

You call January 6, 2021 an "insurrection"? That was an insurrection — and it was eventually suppressed with bloodshed.

The "Bacon's Castle" on the package was not Nathaniel Bacon's own house, but another manor that was occupied and looted by his supporters. It's not far away.

Graves in the Woods (1)

Moormans River, near Free Union, Virginia

M. and I rolled in Sunday the 30th after a long train trip to Virginia to see (most) of her East Coast relatives.

Cabin chimney above
the Moormans River

We like to travel by train, which leaves you with a lot of episodic memories, like being awakened somewhere in the Ohio River valley by the bright lights of a coal-fired power plant shining in the window, or further up the drainage, watchcing the Kenawha and New rivers running brown and out of their banks with water from this winter's storms.

We walked from her brother's house down to the Moormans River, which was high enough for boating, had anyone so desired. I know that it often drops to a trickle, and he did tell a story of abandoning a kayak trip one summer for lack of water.

This chimney and foundation, laid up with local stone, are on the trail to the river. The brother, who has lived there more than twenty years, said that he only recently had spotted some grave sites near the cabin. Two are parallel sunken graves, the others less sunken but still marked with small headstones and footstones.

Those markers are small slabs of the native stone. They bear no inscriptions. Either there were once wooden markers that decayed, or there were none. Perhaps people just remembered: "That grave was Ma's, and little Bessie is buried next to her."Now no one remembers.

Two sunken graves. Others are nearby.

We all went hiking too in Shenandoah National Park, on a little piece of the Appalachian Trail, and that was an afternoon that I cherished.

I support public lands as much as anyone, but here too there are hidden presences — a overgrown old road, a pasture gate lost in regrown forest. People were evicted to make the park.

Although the lands earmarked for the new park were covered with homes and farms, there was little public outcry when inhabitants of the nearly 5,000 individual land tracts were expelled, their lands presented to the federal government. After all, the Blue Ridge dwellers were not only different from the mainstream of American society, but, according to one contemporary journalist, their existence in the dark hollows represented "about the limit of destitution at which human life could be sustained." Park promoters and government officials publicized the fact that "these people will be moved to more civilized regions of agriculture and industry." The creation of the national park propelled these backward mountaineers into a world they had previously eschewed.

When archaeologists found a toy ray gun in the rubble of Corbin Hollow, they knew these were not people "cut off from the current of American life."

From the first day of the survey in Nicholson, Corbin, and Weakley hollows on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, formerly home to three communities with eighteenth-century roots, it was obvious that some observations about the region were flawed. Automobiles, Coke bottles, Bakelite toys, cologne, hair tonic, and hot-sauce bottles, even a half-torn 1931 cellulose card calendar featuring the artwork of Maxfield Parrish, all shattered the accepted image of backward hillbillies eking out an existence that was "completely cut off from the current of American life." (Archaeology magazine, "Shenandoah's Secret History," Jan.–Feb. 2000).

More graves there too, I am sure, if you know where to look.