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Located along White Marsh Road in Suffolk, VA, the Jericho Ditch and trail are clearly marked. Nine miles long, the ditch was dug by slave labor in the early 1800s.
Photo credit: USFWS Photo
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The Refuge Road to Freedom
Great Dismal Swamp Gets First Designation (February 5, 2004)
The Great Dismal Swamp Refuge, 111,000 acres that lay across the Virginia and North Carolina border, has become the first refuge named by the National Park Service to its Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program.
Established by federal legislation in 1998, the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program was created to extol the historical significance of the Underground Railroad in the eradication of slavery and the evolution of the national civil rights movement. Official celebration of the designation will be held February 13.
The refuge, established in 1974, protects a remnant of what is thought to have been a million-acre swamp. It is one of the largest unbroken expanses of forested swamp along the East Coast, and is still impenetrable in places.
Since the 17th century, the swamp has served as a refuge and route to freedom. For some, the swamp offered a means to purchase their freedom through work in cedar and cypress timber production or on the Dismal Swamp Canal, which runs along the refuge’s eastern edge.
Others found refuge in the swamp, hiding in its dense underbrush. These "outlyers" established maroon communities. In 1861, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote, "Children were born, bred, lived and died here." Such maroon communities continue to be the subject of historical research.
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Congress created the Great Dismal Swamp Refuge in 1974. Its history can be read on a number of markers within the refuge. Slave laborers for the Dismal Swamp Canal Company, formed in 1787 to connect the Chesapeake Bay with Albemarle Sound, dug the Washington Ditch as part of a system to transport timber to market. The canal, dug alongside the ditch, was completed in 1805. Photo Credit: USFWS Photo
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For still others, the swamp was a stopping point on their way to Norfolk or Portsmouth, VA, or to Albemarle Sound and Elizabeth City, NC, where they could secure passage on a ship going north. During the Civil War, Union regiments of the United States Colored Troops marched down the canal bank from Deep Creek, VA, to northeastern North Carolina to liberate and recruit enslaved African Americans.
"We may never know how many people found refuge in the swamp," notes
Julie Rowand, Visitor Services specialist. "Now, the refuge's cultural
history has become a great vehicle to share information about the Dismal
Swamp’s natural history with a new audience."
– February 5, 2004
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