IN THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP – The oppressive heat, venomous serpents and boot-snatching muck that made the Great Dismal Swamp a barrier to European settlement ever since colonial times also made it a haven for thousands of people escaping slavery before the Civil War.
This fall, a permanent exhibition will open to provide some detail about those lives, part of an expanding effort by the National Park Service and other agencies to recast the experience of pre-war slaves. Scholars are using sites like the Great Dismal Swamp, straddling the line between North Carolina and Virginia, to highlight a little-known side of history, in which the freedom trail for slaves didn’t always run to the north.
“What you find with places like the Dismal Swamp is that there were oases within the South for people,” said Michelle Lanier, a curator at the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites and Properties. “When you start to look at these communities that kind of created a safe haven or safer haven, it really explodes our simplified notion of what the underground railroad was.”
The swamp is still an inhospitable place. Carefully edging his way along a path dotted with hip-deep patches of mud, a machete swinging by his side, American University professor Dan Sayers has been retracing the paths taken by some of those people for more than a decade. Sayers’ research has led to the creation of the permanent exhibit and to a greater understanding of people who left behind very few testaments to their lives.
“They were creating their own world, and, when you think about it, not many people have that opportunity, even in the present day,” said Sayers, who spends summers in the swamp with students and other researchers, piecing together a picture of life in the area from fragments sometimes as small as fingernail parings.
Hunched over carefully dug holes, the researchers look for signs of human habitation. They’ve found dozens of artifacts, ranging from pot shards to musket balls to pieces of flintlock from a French gun made sometime between 1650 and 1800. The work requires a forensic level of attention, with signs that would pass without notice to the untrained eye sparking excitement from the students. Different shades of soil in a particular pattern, for example, could indicate a post hole for a wooden cabin, or perhaps a fire pit.
“This isn’t the archaeology that any of us are used to,” Sayers said. “In some ways, we were really starting from scratch.”
