Great Dismal Swamp

For two centuries, the Great Dismal Swamp was a place where people went to disappear. Enslaved Africans and Native Americans fled into its forested wetlands on the Virginia-North Carolina border and built hidden communities on raised islands, and by the Civil War thousands of these maroons lived there beyond the reach of slaveholders. The swamp once spread across more than one million acres (4,000 km²). Today its largest intact remnant is protected by the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, about 113,000 acres (457 km²) of forested wetland with round, dark Lake Drummond at its heart.

George Washington saw the swamp as an opportunity. In 1763 he helped found the Dismal Swamp Company to drain and farm it, an effort that turned instead to logging Atlantic white cedar and cypress. Enslaved laborers dug the 22-mile (35 km) Dismal Swamp Canal, completed in 1805 to link Chesapeake Bay with Albemarle Sound, and it still carries boats today as the oldest operating artificial waterway in the country. Union Camp donated the land that became the refuge, which Congress established in 1974. The refuge is now part of the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

• North Carolina
  The Tar Heel State, from the Blue Ridge to the Outer Banks located in
• Virginia
  The Old Dominion, from the Chesapeake to the Blue Ridge located in
• Chesapeake Bay
  The largest estuary in the United States near
• The Atlantic Coastal Plain
  The flat lowland fringing the Atlantic and Gulf part of