![]() ![]() Contrary to popular narratives, the Dismal was not an empty, unstewarded place prior to colonists encountering it. A page from Stowe’s novel, DredĮven before marronage, the Dismal has a long history of inhabitation. Additionally, dispossessed white indentured servants likely lived as Maroons in smaller numbers. Enslaved laborers become quasi-members of Maroon communities after the Adventurers to Drain the Great Dismal Swamp, under George Washington’s leadership, solidified in 1762. Those who remained in the Dismal and didn’t migrate further away were joined by Black Maroons who became the majority in the Dismal in the 17th century. Indigenous people, such as the Chesapeake, Nansemond, Meherrin, and Tuscarora tribes, likely fled to the Dismal in large numbers as a means of survival from 1607–1730 following violence and epidemics from colonization. Self-liberated Black people who fled nearby plantations settled in the swamp from the 17th to mid-19th century and grew their families. The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp were comprised of different groups. This practice of survival and impulse for revolutionary imagination still exists in Maroon communities, such as those in Suriname and Accompong Town, Moore Town, Charles Town, and Scott’s Hall in Jamaica. and Canada were safe havens and enslaved people’s ultimate desire was assimilation. South, despite hushed attention around it in favor of liberal notions that the Northern U.S. Many maroon societies formed along or within swamps in the U.S. The practice of removing oneself from enslavement and slaveholding society to form communities near or far from plantations is known as marronage and was endemic across the Americas, the Caribbean, and other places where slavery was sustained. Black Bears in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge The Great Dismal Swamp was basically a known secret at the time - portrayed by white people as a site to be feared and fought, but for those who lived there, it was a site of resistance, survival, and fugitive community-building. ![]() In response, fearful white citizens across the Tidewater area wrote to their colonial governors to encourage the formation of brutal militias. Written warnings of coming slave rebellions, and suspicion that they were tied to the Dismal, are also documented. Clippings from the Virginia Gazette, Edenton Gazette, and other periodicals contained bulletins promoting the capture of self-emancipated Black people who had fled into the Dismal. Newspapers are also evidence of the mystery and fear surrounding the Dismal. White painters, like Thomas Moran, constructed similar depictions of the Dismal and its community members. ![]() Edgar Allen Poe’s “Dream Land,” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp,” and Thomas Moore’s “A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” among others, built the swamp’s reputation as a fearful place of wild creatures, human and non-human alike. ![]() There was also a white literary imagination surrounding the Great Dismal Swamp. Aerial view of Lake Drummond in the center of the Great Dismal Swamp taken by Rob Bruner William Byrd II named the swamp as such after he surveyed it in 1728 - a journey in which he saw a Maroon family - and decided that it would only be useful for lumber harvesting, canal digging, and other destructive changes. The name, “Dismal,” comes from the English understanding of swamps and wetlands as wastelands generally bleak, or dismal, and dangerous to “civilized” humans. The Dismal always occupied a mythical, haunted space within the white colonial imaginary. The Great Dismal Swamp also has a history of myth, white colonial fear, and resistance to slavery in the form of world-building Maroon communities - communities of Indigenous, African, and African American people who fled slavery and settler-colonialism to establish communities in the Dismal from the 17th through mid-19th centuries. ![]()
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