Lake Drummond

In 1806 the Irish poet Thomas Moore printed "A Ballad. The Lake of the Dismal Swamp", subtitled "Written at Norfolk, in Virginia", about a young man who believed his dead sweetheart had gone into the swamp: "They made her a grave, too cold and damp / For a soul so warm and true; / And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, / Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, / She paddles her white canoe." Moore credited the tale to an anonymous story he was told, and his own footnote puts the swamp "ten or twelve miles distant from Norfolk" — nothing he printed says he ever saw the lake. The swamp's documented history is stranger than its ghost: for generations it sheltered maroon communities of people who had escaped slavery, a past that archaeology, not folklore, has been recovering.

The lake at the centre of the Great Dismal Swamp has belonged to the imagination for so long that its documented history tends to get lost. That is a pity, because the documented history is the better story. Colonial tradition credits the lake to William Drummond, first governor of the Albemarle settlements in what became North Carolina, who is said to have come upon it while hunting in 1663. He was captured and executed on Governor William Berkeley's orders in the reprisals that followed Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, and the water kept his name. In 1728 William Byrd II ran the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina along the swamp's edge and supplied the adjective that stuck. Byrd did not go in: as Encyclopedia Virginia notes, he sent assistants instead, complaining that "there was no Intelligence of this Terra Incognita to be got". Then came the drainage men. In 1763 the Virginia General Assembly granted 40,000 acres to the Dismal Swamp Land Company, an enterprise assembled by George Washington and his brother John Augustine Washington, whose plan was to drain the wetland for rice ground and timber. The company bought fifty-four enslaved people, who dug the ditches, hauled the logs and lived in shacks along the swamp's western edge. Two of those cuts — Washington Ditch and Jericho Ditch — are still there, and are now the refuge's main walking routes. From 1793 crews began the twenty-two-mile Dismal Swamp Canal between Deep Creek in Virginia and South Mills in North Carolina, again with enslaved labour; Encyclopedia Virginia dates its completion to 1804 and records that between the heat, the mosquitoes and the root mat the work advanced about thirty feet a day. In the middle of all this arrived a tourist with a notebook. The Irish poet Thomas Moore spent part of his fourteen-month American voyage at Norfolk, and out of it came "A Ballad. The Lake of the Dismal Swamp", printed at page 38 of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (London: James Carpenter, 1806) under the subtitle "Written at Norfolk, in Virginia". Moore opens it with a prose note credited only to "Anon.": "They tell of a young man, who lost his mind upon the death of a girl he loved, and who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never afterwards heard of." He had said in his ravings, the note goes on, that the girl had "gone to the Dismal Swamp", and "it is supposed he had wandered into that dreary wilderness, and had died of hunger, or been lost in some of its dreadful morasses." The first stanza is the part everyone quotes: "They made her a grave, too cold and damp / For a soul so warm and true; / And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, / Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, / She paddles her white canoe." In the stanza it is the maiden who paddles. Her lover hollows a boat of birchen bark, follows a "meteor spark" out across the water, and "the boat returned no more". The ditches cut both ways. The wilderness that resisted drainage sheltered people the drainage companies owned. Freedom seekers had been going into the swamp since the late 1600s, and by the 1840s, Encyclopedia Virginia notes, it "was widely known as a place of marronage and resistance to slavery". Some passed through on their way north; others stayed for generations, in communities on the dry interior islands. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the swamp today, cites the historians' estimate that some 50,000 self-emancipated African Americans — along with free Blacks, Indigenous people and outsider Europeans — lived in the swamp across the whole period. Those communities emptied during the Civil War: after Union forces took Norfolk in May 1862, many maroons went out to Fort Monroe. The maroon settlements are an archaeological site. Daniel O. Sayers, of American University, ran five years of field schools on a large interior island and published the results as A Desolate Place for a Defiant People (University Press of Florida, 2014). Interviewed by Humanities magazine in 2015, Sayers described a world that "thousands of African-American Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and enslaved African-American laborers" made for themselves "between 1607 and 1860", cultivating community fields and making furniture, instruments and containers out of wood and swamp plants. He also pointed out how much has gone: the swamp today is roughly a tenth of its eighteenth-century extent, cut down by the lumbering and canal work of the nineteenth century. The modern refuge dates from 1973, when the Union Camp Corporation gave 49,097 acres to The Nature Conservancy, which passed them to the federal government. Congress established the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge the following year. It now protects some 113,000 acres, and Lake Drummond sits in the middle of it.

Lake Drummond lies inside the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The US Fish and Wildlife Service gives the refuge an area of nearly 113,000 acres (about 45,700 hectares) and describes it as the largest intact remnant of a swamp that once covered more than a million acres of south-eastern Virginia and north-eastern North Carolina. Refuge headquarters is at 3100 Desert Road, Suffolk, Virginia 23434-8973, telephone (757) 986-3705. On 24 September 2026 the refuge's page said that visitor centre hours were "limited by staff availability" and asked for a call before any visit. The refuge has more than 40 miles (64 km) of trails and boardwalks, open from sunrise to sunset and reached from four entrances: Portsmouth Ditch, Jericho Lane, Washington Ditch and Railroad Ditch. The road to the water is the Lake Drummond Wildlife Drive, which leaves from the Railroad Ditch trailhead at 3120 Desert Road. It is a gravel road six miles (9.7 km) long one way, with three boardwalks along it and a boat ramp with parking at the lake end. From 1 April to 30 September it is open from 7am to 7pm, and from 1 October to 31 March from 7.30am to 5pm; the electronic entry gate closes an hour earlier. It is the only part of the refuge that needs a vehicle permit. The fee is $5 in cash per vehicle, paid at headquarters or at a self-service station about half a mile along the drive, and it is waived for holders of a Duck Stamp or an America the Beautiful pass; the refuge also sells its own annual pass for $25. The other way in is by water, along the Feeder Ditch from the Dismal Swamp Canal, an access operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Camping is forbidden on refuge land; the Corps runs a primitive 24-hour recreation site near the lake that can only be reached by boat from the Feeder Ditch. Boats of up to 25 horsepower may use Lake Drummond itself, "as the ditches are not maintained for passage". The refuge's own pages disagree on the depth of the lake: the boating page gives an average of 3 feet (0.9 m), while the fishing page gives an average of 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to 1.8 m) and an area of about 3,100 acres (1,250 hectares). Fishing is allowed year-round in daylight under Virginia regulations, in the lake and the Feeder Ditch, for chain pickerel, crappie, sunfish and catfish. White-tailed deer, black bear, wild turkey, coyote and grey squirrel are hunted in designated areas on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 1 October to the first Saturday in January, with a refuge hunt permit. The refuge lists one of the largest black bear populations on the east coast among its wildlife. The refuge's account of its own history says that in 1763 George Washington and other investors formed the Dismal Swamp Company, which used enslaved workers to build drainage ditches and roads. It also states that from the late 1600s until the Civil War freedom-seekers built settlements on islands deep in the swamp. The refuge is listed as a site of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.