The Fugitive Community in the Great Dismal Swamp

The Great Dismal Swamp, an ombrotrophic peatland^[1] of cypress and Atlantic white cedar forest, once covered 2,000 square miles of Virginia and North Carolina^[2]. Although it still remains one of the largest intact wild areas on the Atlantic coast^[1], due to drainage, timber industry and development, today it is only about one tenth the size it was four hundred years ago^[2]. The swamp is home to bears, birds, deer, amphibians, snakes, mosquitos and, historically, people^[2].

As far back as 13,000 years, Indigenous peoples inhabited the swamp, hunting and harvesting food and materials^[5]. After European colonization of the Americas, the swamp became an isolated refuge, first for Native Americans fleeing genocide, but then for hundreds, possibly thousands, of African Americans who escaped from slavery, known as ‘maroons’^[2].

Maroons have existed across the world from Latin America to the islands of the Indian Ocean, but only recently have archaeologists begun to accept the existence and uncover the history of maroons in the US from the early 1600s to the civil war. Historians long-suffered from a racial bias, emphasizing the white activists of the underground railroad but downplaying the self-emancipation of African Americans throughout the history of slavery in the US^[2]. Archeologists excavating in the Great Dismal feel their work is a mission to give voice to these forgotten peoples.

Other maroon communities existed in the US, from New Orleans to Alabama to Florida, but the Great Dismal is believed to be the largest and the most isolated from the rest of American society. Studies have found that the people of the Great Dismal maroon community built houses, cleared fields, created gardens, hunted, fished, and built tools, furniture and musical instruments for ten generations. The archaeological record appears to end after the civil war, possibly due to African Americans being able to live freely outside the swamp, and possibly due to timber companies draining and encroaching on the swamp for old growth cypress and Atlantic white cedar trees^[2].

There are at least 200 islands in the swamp that could have provided habitable land for maroons and, despite thousands of artifacts being found so far, only a tiny amount of the swamp has been surveyed, meaning the area is rich for more study and discovery^[2].

References

^[1]Funk, W. H. (2017). The Dismal Swamp: One Road out of Slavery Took You Straight into the Boggiest Place You’ve Ever Been. Humanities, 38(2). https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/spring/feature/the-dismal-swamp-one-road-out-slavery-took-you-straight-the-boggiest-place-you%E2%80%99ve-ever-been

^[2]Grant, R. (2016). Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/deep-swamps-archaeologists-fugitive-slaves-kept-freedom-180960122/

^[3]Struzik, E. (2022). Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat. Island Press.

^[4]Struzik, E. (2022). Swamps, Bogs, Marshes and More! [Living on Earth]. https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=22-P13-00041&segmentID=3

^[5]Maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp. (n.d.). WAMS, New York Historical Society. https://wams.nyhistory.org/building-a-new-nation/early-expansion/maroons-in-the-great-dismal-swamp/