By a quarter past eight, the woods were bright and humming, and the summer heat had rolled in off Route 17. The early August air was soft and humid by the canal on the eastern side of the Great Dismal Swamp’s Virginia half. The bikers, the joggers, the hikers, the bird-watchers, and the couple loading up their dusty SUV each chimed “morning” one after another, all cradling the letter m at the roofs of their mouths.
Eric Sheppard stepped gingerly ahead of me. His turquoise polo shirt was lined with pin-sized holes on the collar, and he’d tucked the hem into his tan boot-cut khakis. He made his way to a muddy footpath facing the canal, away from the cluster of visitors. The water gleamed like black marble, reflecting the canopy.
“A whole lotta stuff went on here,” Sheppard said, gazing out over the pool and into the tangle of poplars where his forebears had been enslaved. “Our ancestors’ bones are still in that swamp right there.”
Listen to locals long enough and you’ll come to find that the Dismal shifts in the eye of the beholder. The land’s kaleidoscopic history is much the same. For one of Eric’s distant relatives, a lumberman named Moses Grandy, the swamp was at once the site of his bondage and the nexus of his freedom. Grandy toiled in the cavernous morass for decades as an enslaved laborer before stashing away enough coin to purchase himself outright. He was one in a colony of workers who lived in camps in the bog. Out of porous peat soil they cut and glued canals, lugged cypress and white cedar trunks, and crafted millions of shingles. Most inhabitants were enslaved, but some harnessed the swamp to other ends. Some sought refuge in it.
From the late 17th century to the end of the Civil War, thousands of maroons—runaways who obtained their freedom by occupying remote and uninhabited regions—lived in relative secrecy throughout the 750-square-mile wilderness. No one is sure exactly how many people escaped enslavement within its confines, but this much is clear: The Great Dismal Swamp, an area regarded by colonial settlers as so utterly inhospitable that its very air was once said to be toxic, was over multiple centuries home to the largest maroon community in the United States.