People escaping enslavement found refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp. A congressman wants to revive its forgotten history.

This piece was originally published in The Virginian-Pilot on Dec. 22, 2020 by Gary A. Harki.

The Great Dismal Swamp has long been recognized for its importance as a National Wildlife Refuge, and now local activists and members of Congress want it to get a similar federal recognition for its role in history.

U.S. Rep. Donald McEachin (D) has introduced a bill that would get the swamp designated a National Heritage Area, which could bring federal funding for historic preservation.

“It also allows us to call attention to this region as having a really unique history and cultural landscape,” said Alexandra Sutton Lawrence, Southeast Regional Program Director at The Wilderness Society.

From the start of European settlements in the 1600s through the Civil War, the swamp was a safe-haven for thousands of Native Americans and Black people escaping slavery.

"You can think of the swamp as a place of resistance,"

The effort is spearheaded by the Great Dismal Swamp Stakeholder Collaborative, which includes local Native American tribes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Association for the Study of African American Life & History.

McEachin said that during his first visit to the swamp as a congressman, he was impressed by the work being done to introduce wildlife back into the area. He said he’s fascinated that people who’d escaped slavery made a life deep inside the swamp.

“When you think about the folks seeking their freedom, they were made of sterner stuff than I am,” he said. “We need to make sure we preserve the swamp for future generations … for tourism purposes, for archaeological study, for the reintroduction of wildlife.”

You can think of the swamp as a place of resistance, said Dan Sayers, a historical archaeologist and chair of the anthropology department at American University. Sayers has found sites in the swamp where escaped slaves settled.

Former enslaved people who lived out their lives in these communities were known as “maroons.” They were close enough to plantations to make slaveholders nervous but hidden in a forbidding environment that few white men would dare venture.

Even today, it’s a landscape of muddy bogs, snakes, bears and clouds of mosquitoes. George Washington forced enslaved people to build a canal inside it and tried to drain it for farmland to no avail. Instead the swamp — at one time more than 2,000 square miles stretching from Portsmouth to North Carolina — sat in the midst of antebellum Virginia as a beacon to people who wanted to escape slavery.

There’s a spirit that links groups like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street to the maroons.

“They are occupying,” Sayers said of the maroons. “It’s just not in the middle of the city where they’re shut down in a week or two. They are taking advantage of the landscape in a different way than protesters, but it’s still a mode of resistance.”

When the first settlers arrived in Jamestown in 1607, the east coast of America from Norfolk to Florida was more or less one big swamp, Sayers said. And as European settlers took land, many Native Americans retreated into the Great Dismal Swamp, which has historical significance for the Nansemond Indian Nation and the Haliwa-Saponi and Meherrin tribes.

Sayers said he found evidence of Native Americans using the same land deep in the swamp where he found evidence of maroon communities. They were there before Jamestown, but after the start of colonialism, Native Americans found it to be a place where they could gather and revitalize their communities.

“It was dry ground (in the swamp) to Indigenous people for thousands of years before any expansion,” he said. “They were going to these same places.”

“(Maroons) represented the exact opposite of what the pro-slavery justification required.”

In 1856, David Hunter Strother ventured into the Great Dismal Swamp in search of maroons for Harper’s Magazine. When he crossed paths with a large Black man in tattered clothes with a gun in his hand, he froze in fear and hid until the man passed. Later he asked the two Black men who guided him through the swamp — it’s not clear if they were enslaved or free — about him. They whispered the name “Osman” but would say nothing more.

Osman, who likely had been born and enslaved in Africa, probably escaped to live in one of the small swamp communities that was nearly cut off from the outside world. He was probably going to trade with some of the less remote maroon outposts, said Brent Morris, chair of the department of humanities at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and author of the upcoming book “Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp.”

Morris said there were three types of maroon communities in the swamp, all an affront to the white slave owners. The swamp was a place of resistance they could neither ignore nor eradicate.

“(Maroons) represented the exact opposite of what the pro-slavery justification required,” Morris said.

There were those that lived on the edge of the swamp, often trading and working with enslaved people to make wooden shingles to support themselves. Slave owners would pay for additional shingles that they made beyond quotas. Slaves would work with maroons to make amounts well past the quotas, then pay or trade with them for the work done. The slave owners knew what was happening but benefited from the extra work and rarely wanted to venture into the swamp to capture them.

Other escaped slaves would settle on the swamp’s perimeter for a short time. Some would hide there before moving on through the Underground Railroad. Others would raid nearby white settlements.

Deep swamp maroons, like Osman, lived on small islands of land a few feet above the bogs. Their settlements were miles deep into the swamp, thick with trees and mud and nearly impossible for outsiders to find.

The three groups didn’t fit in the theory that many enslavers used to justify owning another human being — that Black people were intellectually inferior and couldn’t take care of themselves or thrive in their own communities.

“They obviously didn’t need the guidance of white people, and they would rather live in the middle of a swamp than live in bondage,” Morris said. “So the fact that this large group of people had decided that was a slap in the face to the enslavers and totally invalidated their pro-slavery argument.”

Finding history in the swamp can be difficult.

The settlements discovered by Sayers required driving miles on rough roads, then wading through water for long stretches before coming to dry land. While tannic acid from the bark of juniper and cypress trees prohibits the growth of bacteria and makes the water safe to drink, it also helps erode any artifacts left behind.

Still, the history is there, said Sutton Lawrence.

Artifacts “are not the only impressions people leave upon a landscape,” she said. “They leave impressions in the form of descendants. And the descendant communities around the swamp are a big part of it.”

Last summer the stakeholder collective hired a historical geographer who interviewed people in communities around the swamp about their family history. “We have people who in some ways are living artifacts.”

Eric Sheppard has traced his roots back to Moses Grandy, who navigated boats on the Great Dismal Swamp’s canals. Sheppard self-published a book about his research.

“All we can do is try to put the pieces of the puzzle together,” he said.

“(Artifacts) are not the only impressions people leave upon a landscape...they leave impressions in the form of descendants.”

Grandy wrote his own account of his time as a slave. He had more freedom than many while piloting barges of lumber. Grandy bought his freedom three times, twice paying out to enslavers who took the money and didn’t release him.

He also lost the love of his life, an enslaved woman who worked on a nearby plantation. They had been together eight months when she was sold further south. They never saw each other again. After buying his freedom a third time, Grandy moved to Boston in the 1840s. From there he’s lost to history.

Grandy knew how to navigate the constraints of slavery and understood the networks and power structure well enough to find a way to escape it, said Marcus Nevius, an assistant history professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of “City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp.”

“He knew well how to read the room. … He knew how to present himself in different places,” Nevius said. “We can draw this out of … his biography by focusing on the way that he describes purchasing his own freedom and his ability to assess people, white and Black, that he engaged.”

Sheppard believes Grandy helped people escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. There’s no documentation of that, like much of the swamp’s history. But it’s plausible, given that he captained barges through the canals.

Norfolk and Portsmouth were hubs for the railroad. Escaped slaves would come from Richmond and from further south to seek passage up the Eastern Shore to Wilmington and Philadelphia.

“There were probably people under the shingles that were getting to Norfolk as well to get on some of the ships going north,” Sheppard said. “The Underground Railroad operated in secret and they did their job magnificently.”