Virginia: Swamps & Split Levels

Colonel William E. Byrd, the colonial ancestor of Virginia’s Senator Harry F. Byrd, named the place the Great Dismal Swamp. After trekking through the muck and mire with a band of hardy surveyors, Byrd emerged bug-bitten almost to death (the Dismal Swamp’s yellow fly, they still say, will politely lift a man’s hat from his head so as to get a better bite at his ears). The swamp, straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border, just across the James River Bay from Norfolk, was nothing better than a “filthy bogg,” he wrote. Even birds would not fly over “this horrible desart for fear of the noisome exhalations that rise from this vast body of dirt and nastiness.”

After Byrd came George Washington, who saw a chance to make a buck out of the bogs. Washington bought up a chunk of the swamp, organized a company called “Adventurers for Draining the Great Dismal Swamp,” put slaves to work building a canal, which is still in use. It was profitless. Washington finally sold the land to Lighthorse Harry Lee for $20,000, but when Lee could not meet the payments, the property reverted to Washington and was sold with Washington’s estate in 1828 for $12,000.

Where the Father of Our Country had failed, who would take a financial chance? Previews, Inc., that’s who. Previews, Inc. is a real estate firm that, with associated companies, has purchased about 160,000 acres of Dismal Swampland, is turning some of it into farm land, hopes to sell more to housing developers for Norfolk’s spreading population.

Creeping Splits. Previews, Inc.’s effort has conservationists, swamp lovers, hunters and bird watchers so mad they could swat a lepidoptera. They are lyric in their descriptions of the Great Dismal Swamp as a primeval forest of peat bog, cypress and juniper trees, of diaphanous curtains of Spanish moss, of copperhead and rattlesnake, bear, deer and mink, and of quicksand. The swamp once covered 1,500 sq. mi. But modern civilization’s bulldozers have cut it down to some 600 sq. mi. Now even to the Great Dismal Swamp comes the forward tread of split-levelism.

Well, it does seem a pity. The Great Dismal Swamp story has a shuddery, compelling quality. Thomas Moore, after seeing the swamp’s saucer-shaped Lake Drummond, wrote a ballad about a young man who went mad over the death of his beloved:

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 firefly lamp, She paddles her white canoe.

Medicine Chest. On the fringes of the swamp live veteran trappers and guides who can recite the ballad without missing a beat, and who know every legend about the dark mysteryland. The swamp water is perfectly potable and is famed for its long-staying qualities of freshness, but it looks as if it had been pumped from an outhouse. For years, the swamp’s vegetation was supposed to be an unequaled medicine chest. The pale blue hepatica, with leaves shaped like the lobes of the liver, was good for any liver disorder. Virginia Bluebell cured chest ailments. The common yellow yarrow was standard treatment for toothache.

Most magical and powerful of all was the wild flower known as St. Johnswort. Gathered on June 24 (St. John’s Day), it was prominently displayed to frighten away witches, and the seventh son of a seventh son could accurately divine all kinds of secrets from it..

Peppers & Buttons. The Great Dismal Swamp teems with deer, great blue heron, wildcat, mink, raccoon, muskrat, quail, rabbit. One naturalist listed 52 different kinds of birds he found there. In the lake, the perch, pike and sun.isn are lamed for their tastiness. Most guides—all of whom, of course, go by the name of “Cap’n”—can lead the hunter to bear without any trouble. One old swamp character, in fact, insists that he can talk to bears in “Bear Latin.”

Such is the lure and the magic and the profound beauty of the wilderness that the conservationists cannot understand why civilization insists on intruding. Among these is Frederic Heutte, Norfolk’s superintendent of parks and forestry, and director of the city’s Botanical Gardens. He would like to see U.S. Route 17, which runs along the swamp border, turned into a floral paradise. For Heutte has discovered a native stand of gordonia lasianthus, “one of our most prized ornamentals. Together with clethra alnifolia. commonly known as the sweet pepper-bush, and the buttonbush, crape myrtle, oleanders and altheas, the highway would be transformed into one of the most beautiful highways in America.” It would also help save what is left of the Great Dismal Swamp. This week the Department of the Interior began a survey to discover how much of the swamp might reasonably be saved for future generations, who may want to see for themselves the place where the madman and his damsel

Are seen at the hour of midnight damp

To cross the Lake by a firefly lamp,

And paddle their white canoe!