Lake Drummond

Lake Drummond is a shallow, tea-coloured lake at the heart of the Great Dismal Swamp, and its ghost has a publication date. 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. As he had frequently said, in his ravings, that the girl was not dead, but gone to the Dismal Swamp, 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." It is the maiden who paddles, not the lover. He 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. This is not a legend. It is 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 sits inside the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, and reaching the water takes planning: this is not a lake you drive up to. Refuge headquarters is at 3100 Desert Road, Suffolk, Virginia 23434, telephone (757) 986-3705. The visitor centre keeps limited hours depending on staffing, so call before setting out. Trails are open sunrise to sunset. There are four vehicle entrances — Washington Ditch, Jericho Lane, Portsmouth Ditch and Railroad Ditch — and more than forty miles of trails and boardwalks, several of them running along the very ditches dug by enslaved labourers from the 1760s onward. The simplest way to the lake is the Lake Drummond Wildlife Drive, a self-guided six-mile route that starts from the Railroad Ditch trailhead at 3120 Desert Road and ends at the water, where there are two lakefront piers and a boat ramp. The other way in is by boat, up the Feeder Ditch from the Dismal Swamp Canal; that route is for watercraft only, with no road access at all. The refuge permits boats of up to 25 horsepower on Lake Drummond itself and nowhere else — in its own words, "the ditches are not maintained for passage". Fishing is allowed during daylight hours year-round under Virginia state regulations, in the lake and the Feeder Ditch, for chain pickerel, crappie, sunfish and catfish. Three practical warnings. The refuge holds one of the largest black bear populations on the east coast. There are managed hunting seasons for white-tailed deer, black bear, wild turkey, coyote and grey squirrel, so check the refuge's hunt information before walking in autumn. And the ground itself burns: water levels in the swamp are managed in part to keep the peat wet, and access can close when fire risk is high. The lake averages only about three feet deep, but it is large, open and tannin-black, and it hides everything under the surface.