A Visit to the Great Dismal Swamp

A birthday trip to the Great Dismal Swamp provided me with more than a typical nature hike

In a detour from the next chapter of my memoir, If You Only Knew, which will come out on Sunday, May 12th, I thought you might enjoy reading about my recent birthday weekend.

When I told friends and family I was celebrating my sixty-ninth birthday in the Great Dismal Swamp, I got more than a few reactions. Some thought I’d lost it. A few wondered if I was joking. Others expressed sympathy. And still others just shook their heads in disbelief. The name itself, without any knowledge of the place, evokes those responses.

I have no responsibility for the name. For that, you can blame William Byrd II (1674 – 1744). A Virginia planter, enslaver, lawyer, surveyor, and writer, he is considered the founder of Richmond. When he traveled to what was then a million acres of swampland bordering Virginia and North Carolina, he described it as a dismal place. The name stuck. Fortunately, his inhumane treatment of other humans didn’t.

An 1807 sketch of the Great Dismal Swamp shows its location in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina

The swamp holds mystery, beauty, and history. It’s alive with turtles, river otters, snakes, beavers, deer, coyotes, and bears. It’s a warehouse of native plants, medicinal herbs, and edible fruit such as blackberries and paw-paws.

A fawn finding its legs on the banks of a creek

And, over the course of two centuries, the swamp was the home to an estimated 50,000 maroons.

According to the Encyclopedia Virginia,

Beginning in the 1730s with the Chesapeake Rebellion, the Dismal Swamp became a place of refuge for Black insurgents as well as for African Americans fleeing slavery. These maroons mingled with Indians who had been driven off their lands… By the 1840s the Great Dismal Swamp had become an almost mythical place of enslaved resistance and rebellion.

Today, archeologists are discovering and documenting evidence of these maroon communities (Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom | History| Smithsonian Magazine). And the swamp has been designated as an Underground Railroad Network to Freedom site by the National Park Service.

Wendy and I learned all about this and more from our guide, Penny Lazauskas, from Nature’s Calling. Penny is a Certified Environmental Educator, a biologist, and a person of Seminole heritage. She graciously took us on a three-hour private tour of the swamp, where she pointed out turtles laying eggs, otter runs, and a plant that is referred to as “poor man’s soap,” also called Sweet Pepper Bush (Clethra alnifolia L).

Our guide, Penny Lazauskas, points out plants along the trail and poses with Wendy and me at the lake.

But, most importantly, Penny talked about the people of the swamp—the White people, like George Washington, who tried to control and drain the swamp by forcing enslaved people to dig ditches and a canal through it, and Black and Indigenous freedom seekers who would rather carve out an existence in an inhospitable swamp than live their lives at the mercy of people who claimed to own them.

A small pavilion where stories of the Underground Railroad and the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp are told.

For me, travel is most enjoyable when natural beauty is combined with a history lesson. The Great Dismal Swamp offers that and more. It is a sacred place. A mysterious place where Indigenous people of the Nansemond Tribe hunted and foraged among the cedars and cypress trees that surround the largest natural lake in Virginia, which they call Firebird’s Nest (and others refer to as Lake Drummond after the White man who supposedly “discovered” it). A place where countless Black and Indigenous people found sanctuary from those who wished to enslave them. And a place where, in 1865, the United States Colored Troops marched along those ditches dug by enslaved people to liberate the maroons.

A bald cypress and cedar tree on Firebird’s Nest

I definitely plan to return. However, I think I’ll wait a few months. Visiting the swamp in summer is not nearly as pleasant as it was on our spring visit. In summer, the humidity combined with oppressive heat makes even breathing difficult. Mosquitos are, of course, pervasive, and worse than that, according to Ranger Chris, biting yellow flies impervious to insect repellent divebomb any mammal that dares to set foot in their territory. That doesn’t sound like fun!

Fall and winter are a much better time to enjoy the beauty of the swamp. In fact, our guide Penny described an image that I can’t get out of my head. Because the winter is typically too mild in that part of Virginia to warrant hibernation, turtles have been seen walking on snow. Now that’s something I’d love to see!

Maybe one of the offspring of this turtle laying eggs in the swamp might find themselves walking on snow next winter.

I hope you ignore the guffaws and other reactions from your family and friends and visit the Great Dismal Swamp someday. And, if you can’t make it there, find a sacred place near you that causes you to remember those who went before you. It’s sure to become seared into your memory as this swamp is in mine.

As always, it’s a pleasure wandering with you!

Annette