The Great Dismal Swamp’s history of land exploitation, Black resistance, and Indigenous presence remains largely undocumented, even as it continues to shape the environmental justice struggles of the surrounding region today.

The Great Dismal Swamp once stretched across more than a million acres of what is now southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. Colonial land companies, including one founded by George Washington, drained it for farmland and logged it for cypress and cedar, cutting it down to the roughly 150,000 acres that remain today – much of what used to be swamp is now the cities of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Chesapeake. The Dismal Swamp Canal, still one of the oldest operating artificial waterways in the country, was dug almost entirely by enslaved Black labor, and some of the earliest fortunes in this region were built on draining the very land that had sheltered people fleeing slavery.

Just as this place was a space where wealth was built, so too was it a refuge – a recognized site on the Underground Railroad; enslaved people escaped into the swamp’s interior and built lives there, forming some of the largest maroon communities in North America on terrain considered too dangerous for anyone to follow. Its history runs even further back: Indigenous tribes moved through, traded in, and built legends around the swamp long before colonization, and remain connected to it today.

Now a National Wildlife Refuge, the Great Dismal Swamp is still an undercovered part of American history. There is a rich Civil Rights legacy in the region that is too infrequently connected to the history of land and labor exploitation that came out of the swamp; Black wealth-building and the push for educational freedom are a direct result of the communities who settled in and built lives for themselves in the hidden ecosystems of the Dismal. Today, the same communities shaped by the Dismal’s past sit at the center of present-day environmental justice fights, including flooding that disproportionately affects areas built on former wetland. 

This collection attempts to document the diverse histories of the Dismal Swamp and surrounding region as well as the throughline connecting it to what communities here are still facing today.