IN THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP (AP) — 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."
Today the Great Dismal Swamp covers about 112,000
acres. Its size, thick tree cover and uncertain terrain make it a difficult
place to get around in, which must have been even truer before the Civil War,
when it was about 10 times larger. Logging, canals and the growth of nearby
towns shrank the swamp starting in the early 19th century, with the remaining
portion donated in 1973 to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service as a nature
preserve.
The agency has embraced Sayers' research, building
a pavilion to host the exhibit, which they hope will tap into public interest
in the pre-Civil War history of the swamp. The exhibit, which will include
photographs, illustrations and descriptions of the lives of settlers in the
swamp, will serve as an easy way to learn about the work being done, since the
archaeological digs themselves are in the swamp's remote interior. And with the
hot, moist environment acting like a vast digestive system, there isn't a whole
lot to see: Wooden cabins, old clothing and even the bodies of escapees who
settled there have long since been absorbed into the ecosystem.
"People call us and say, 'Where can I go to
see this?' But it's not like there's a house or something," said Deloras
Freeman of the fish and wildlife service.
For Sayers, the point isn't to find sensational
artifacts, it's to establish a history of settlement in the swamp stretching
back to American Indian tribes whose stone tools and pottery were reused by the
runaway slaves called maroons who permanently settled there. The hope is that
the tiny remains of these communities, which left virtually no written
documentation of their existence, will be able to establish how they lived and
how long they stayed.
"Thousands of people lived here, and for the
most part, those lives went unrecorded," Sayers said.
From the evidence Sayers has found so far, people
likely lived in small communities of several wooden buildings clustered
together. Children were born and raised there, and the settlers likely hunted
game and had limited dealings with people living on the fringes of the swamp.
The site was long known as a haven for escapees and
members of Indian tribes avoiding European encroachment. Advertisements seeking
the return of escaped slaves from the 1700s mention the swamp, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe wrote about it as a place of refuge in the novel "Dred: A
Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp." The North Carolina legislature was even
petitioned to do something about the settlements in the swamp, said Wanda
Hunt-McLean, a local historian who studies the underground railroad.
"Many people were warned about traveling near
the edge of the swamp because of stories about blacks living there," she
said.
But the only significant attempt to recapture
slaves in the swamp came after the violent slave uprising led by Nat Turner in
1831, and that barely reached the fringes of the wilderness, Sayers said. The
swamp was simply too dense and treacherous to make sustained efforts to capture
slaves or their descendants worthwhile.
Partly as a result of that, so little documentation
existed on the communities there that Sayers was largely on his own when it
came to looking for artifacts. Starting with the knowledge that people lived in
the swamp and assuming they would have found dry ground on which to settle,
once he found some of those dry patches, he began to dig. Soon, he uncovered
artifacts of human habitation from the 1600s through the early 19th century,
and even traces of prehistoric settlement.
The discovery is helping change the understanding
of what life was like for slaves before the Civil War, said Deanda Johnson,
program manager at the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Network to
Freedom initiative, which has so far designated 400 sites in 30 states as
integral to the history of pre-war resistance to slavery, including the swamp.
"It really is the first civil rights movement,
if you think about it," she said. "There were people willing to take
huge risks in escaping slavery, and in helping others escape."
Sayers' project recently secured a $200,000 grant
that will help bring experts from other disciplines to the study, ranging from
a geographer to a folklorist. He's hoping to find more evidence of humans
living there after 1800 or so, but the project has already put into perspective
the agony slaves must have experienced, Hunt-McLean said.
"Even the atmosphere is different out
there," she said. "It's thick, it's muggy. It's dangerous. For anyone
to prefer that environment to the plantation tells you what life must have been
like for people who weren't free."
Copyright
2011 The Associated Press.
Photo
Caption: In a June 9, 2011 photo, Cindy Goode, of Northern Virginia, measures a
plot at a dig site in Great Dismal Swamp, N.C. Goode is one of the students
that are helping American University professor Daniel Sayers, who has been working
for a decade to piece together the stories of thousands of people who once made
their home in settlements scattered on patches of dry land. (AP Photo/Steve
Helber)
