![]() ![]() ![]() There were maroons in other British colonies and in Spanish and Portuguese colonies as well. The Great Dismal Swamp is not the only place maroon settlements formed. Bourgoin) depicting British troops caught in an ambush by a group of Maroons near Trelawney, Jamaica in 1795, painted in 1810 They made do with the resources they had in the swamp: timber and other organic materials that have long rotted away, as well as old stone tools left behind by the indigenous American inhabitants who preceded them. Sayers says this speaks to the communities’ isolation and self-sufficiency. And while they have recovered thousands of artifacts from these settlements, they’ve recovered very few manufactured goods from the outside world. He and his team have been leading excavations in the swamp for years. Professor Dan Sayers is a historical archaeologist at American University and a leading expert on the Great Dismal Swamp. They most likely cultivated rice and grain fields and participated in trade and cooperation with maroon communities on neighboring islands, but it’s hard to say for certain. Maroon communities formed on little plots of high ground - islands of relatively dry earth that might cover twenty acres or more. Such islands could each house a few dozen maroons. And based on archaeological evidence, it appears that the maroons built elevated cabins that they lifted above the moist ground using wooden posts. Osman, a escaped slave in the Great Dismal Swamp by David Hunter Strother, 1856 Over centuries, the swamp became home to thousands of self-sufficient maroons, and it also served as a stopping point for others who were fleeing North on the Underground Railroad. They were determined to build their own self-ruled communities, with landscape and the forces of nature serving as a buffer between their new lives and the society that enslaved them. Unlike other runaways, some of whom headed to northern cities, maroons lived in the wilderness, often in difficult-to-reach places. The enslaved people who found refuge in the swamp came to be known as “ maroons” (from the Spanish “ c imarrón,” meaning wild or untamed). Fugitive Slaves in the Dismal Swamp by David Edward Cronin, 1888 ![]() Slavery had become widespread, and the swamp became a place for escaped slaves to hide out. When British colonists arrived in the region in the early 1600s, indigenous Americans began moving to the swamp to seek refuge from the Europeans.īut around 1700, the demographics of the swamp started to shift. But archaeologists have found evidence that people were living in the swamp long before that. References to the Great Dismal Swamp - and the escaped slaves who settled there - started appearing in newspapers and other sources in the 1700s. This “dismal” landscape was the site of one of the most remarkable and least told stories of resistance to slavery in American history. William Byrd II, a Virginia planter, called it “a miserable morass where nothing can inhabit.” But people did inhabit the swamp, including thousands of enslaved Africans and African Americans who escaped their captors and formed communities in the swamp. The land was so untamed that horses and boats couldn’t enter, and the colonists who were filing into the region detested it. The panthers that used to live there are now gone, but even today there are black bears, poisonous snakes, and swarms of yellow flies and mosquitoes.īut hundreds of years ago, before the Civil War, the dangers of the swamp and its seeming impenetrability actually attracted people to it. It’s humid and soggy, filled with thorns and thickets, teeming with all sorts of dangerous and unpleasant wildlife. Lake Drummond at Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia, image by Rebecca Wynn for USFWS (CC BY 2.0)Īnd it’s understandable why people called the swamp “dismal.” Temperatures can reach over 100 degrees. The swamp covers about 190 square miles today, but at its peak, before parts of it were drained and developed, it was around ten times bigger, spanning roughly 2,000 square miles of Virginia and North Carolina. Th e Great Dismal Swamp, actually - that’s the name British colonists gave it centuries ago. On the border of Virginia and North Carolina stretches a great, dismal swamp.
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