Digging Up the Secrets of the Great Dismal Swamp
Archaeologists are now uncovering remains of a secret, shadowy human past within the murky landscape of the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia.
He is young, a plantation slave in early 19th century Virginia. His lot since birth, he has suffered a life replete with the physical drudgery and limitations that any slave during the era could expect. But his body showed the scars of an unusually cruel and violent master. He finally finds his chance to escape his plantation prison under the darkness of night. He knows where to go, but the path won't be easy. A secret community awaits him with open arms within the murky world of a great swamp.
This could easily be a scene from a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In fact, she depicts a scene much like this through brief poetic prose on the cover of her 1856 book, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. The novel is a story of 19th century plantation and slave life. One of its characters, Dred, is an escaped slave revolutionary who resides within the protective environs of the Great Dismal Swamp of extreme southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. He incites his fellow fugitives to choose a path of violent rebellion.
Although the story is fictional, it eludes to a community that was reflective of real communities that thrived within the then 2,000-square-mile swamp. Today, the swamp is only 10% of its former size*, but it still shrouds an intriguing sampling of the material remains of communities that took refuge there since the 17th century, although its only refugees today are animals protected under the sanctions of the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, established in the 1970's. Now, Dr. Dan Sayers, assistant professor of anthropology at American University, along with a team of other academics and students, is beginning to uncover the evidence of these communities through systematic research and excavation.
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A sailboat on the Great Dismal Swamp Canal. Wikimedia Commons
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It began with his decision to research the history of the Great Dismal Swamp from the 17th century through 1860 as part of his doctoral dissertation. With little to go on in terms of historical documents and other sources of information, he developed "landscape models" of where communities may have been located, how big they were, and what their characteristics might have been based on documentation and research about other similar swamp communities in Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, and other locations. Said Sayers, "In other areas, local militias were often hired to capture maroons [escaped slaves] and destroy their settlements. When they found these communities, they would document the location of settlements, the sizes, shapes and number of houses and other structures before destroying them." He used his developed models to guide surveys within the swamp as a means to pinpoint where focused research and investigation could begin for the future.
Maroons were not the only group of people who inhabited the swamp. According to Sayers, it harbored at least four other types of communities: indigenous Native Americans, free African-Americans, enslaved African-American canal laborers (who constructed the Great Dismal Swamp canal system), and others, such as criminals. The swamp's massive size and density served as refuge for a surprisingly large and diverse population, when factoring in several centuries of occupation.
"Many of these began as communities of Indigenous Americans around the 1600's," says Sayers. "When maroons started taking refuge in the swamp around the 1700's, they began joining existing communities and also likely formed their own."
The communities tended to occupy one of three distinct areas of the swamp: The canals, the outlying areas of the swamp, and the interior. More isolated and secluded, the interior was occupied by groups who needed to maintain a secret existence in order to survive, such as the maroons, or escaped slaves. Especially for them, life was not easy, as biting insects, bears, snakes, other dangerous wildlife, oppressive humidity and heat, and extremely limited contact with the outside world created conditions that would have been unbearable for most people. But this isolation and secrecy was essential for their survival in a world where flight from enslavement was often harshly punished and freedom, even under difficult circumstances, was prized over slavery.
"These groups are very inspirational," says Sayers. "As details unfold, we are increasingly able to show how people have the ability, as individuals and communities, to take control of their lives, even under oppressive conditions."
As their legacy is slowly being unearthed, the finds, by most people's standards, might be considered rather negligible -- a gunflint, pieces of a broken bowl, the remains of a butchered animal -- but for archaeologists, finds like these, when combined with the context, physical and documentary, can tell a story. Like detectives, they piece together the evidence to find the answers about lives and a forgotten history. An artifact unearthed in the interior of the swamp that was clearly made by hand, for example, might be evidence of the presence of a maroon community, as they would have minimized contact with the outside world and relied on self-made tools and other items to survive. An artifact recovered that was clearly mass-produced and found along or near a canal, on the other hand, might be evidence of a community of enslaved laborers deployed for canal construction.
Thus far, Sayers' research and excavations are revealing the possibility of at least one large community and now support the prospect that thousands of people, for varying reasons, occupied the otherwise forbidding environment from the 1600's up until 1860, when community numbers began to decline. According to Sayers, the artifacts suggest that the communities were dwindling during the years after this date. "There were likely some minor skirmishes in the swamp as well as a gradual but strong exodus of maroons over the course of 3 to 4 years to join the fight--obviously to join the North."
Sayers and other experts and students will continue excavations during the summer of 2011 from May 17 to July 2 under a 3-year, $200,000 We the People grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his project, "Nineteenth Century Tidewater Resistance Communities: The Forgotten Social History of the Great Dismal Swamp". The project is part of the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study, a research effort designed to explore the effects of colonialism, slavery and industrialization on the swamp since the 17th century.
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Information for this article was obtained from the press release service of EurekAlert for reporters. EurekAlert is a global news service operated by the AAAS, the science society.
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*Centuries of logging and other human activities destroyed most of the swamp's ecosystems.
Top Cover Photo: Fugitive Slaves in the Dismal Swamp, Virginia, painting by David Edward Cronin, 1888, oil on canvas, at the New York Historical Society. Wikimedia Commons
Second Photo from Top, Right: Title page, first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1856. Wikimedia Commons
Photo, Bottom Right: Students in the 2010 American University Dismal Swamp Field School excavating a probable 18th or 19th century maroon cabin footprint. Courtesy Dan Sayers, American University.