Shenandoah herald. [volume] (Woodstock, Va.) 1865-1974, 1869-10-28
THE DISMAL SW AMP.
Its History and Mystery.

The air, in circuit of thirty miles, is
filled with odorous vapor almost too OPP
pressive for Inspiration. The great Dis
NAL Swamp is on FIRE The flames are
sweeping its border line for full ten miles
from east to west devouring its under
wood and burning the roots Of its giant
expresses two feet under the soil. The
area OF this wilderness is 800 square miles
It's track lies like that Of an immense hor-
rid serpent, commencing nine miles back
of Norfolk and so far from Bay coast, and
reaching thirty miles into the borders of
North Carolina.
To all the inhabitants of Southern Vir-
ginia living around its dark borders, the
Dismal Swamp has fame like that of a
halfexplored catacomb ASK one Of the
unimaginative residents of the neighbor-
hood, who has never heard of Tom Moore.
about this huge, half-romantic wilderness,
and his description ends with the state
ment that it is an ugly place, of which he
knows little and wishes he knew less, as
he has on some occasion mired it waist
deep, duck-shooting in its margin.
Long ago, in the earliest history of the
country, an adventurous hunter pressed
through to the centre of the wilderness,
and discovered vast sheet of water lying
within its mysterious depth. The water
took the hunters name, since when Lake
Drummond has become known to geo
graphical and other fame. In 1904, the
Irish Tom Moore-the diminutive. poetic,
Jump up aud kiss me, Tom," of the
ladies-visited Norfolk, and heard there
the traditional stories of young man who,
on the death of the girl he loved, lost his
reason. ~ s
In the lovers rawlings, he often said she
was not dead, but gone to the Dismal
Swamp. He suddenly disappeared, and
bis friends never afterwards heard of him,
and it was surmised that ne had wandered
into the gloomy morasses and persisted.
Moore wrote upon the incidents of the
story the weired, melancholy ballad, COM
| mencing,
They made her grave too cold and damp
For soul so warm and true,
And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal
Swamp,
Where all night long by her fire fly lamp,
She paddles her light canoe.
"And her FREELY lamp soon shall see,
And her paddle soon shall hear.
Long and loving our life shall be,
| And I'll hide the maid in cyprae tree
When the footsteps Of death are near"
And made the fame of the spot as lasting
as his own. There is no more significant
instance of the power of genius to bestow
immortality upon whatever it touches than
this Had it not been for Moore's ballad,
the Dismal Swamp would never have
been known, save around its locality, as a
frst-class quagmire, hindering passage
way and checkmating corn fields. 1t is
as familiar to-day, with the mysterious,
romantic interest of Moore's poem to the
worlds reading public as the Dead Sea or
the shadows of the Broken.
What there is of the Dismal Swamp to
the physical eye, is vast sedgy forest of
cypress, juniper, oak, gum and pine trees,
it's gloomy recesses filled with reeds and
shrubbery and tangled wild vine.
To-day the Dismal Swamp canal runs
through it from north to south, and the
Portsmouth and Roanoke railway crosses
its northen borders. Before the war, the
romantic sentiment had built upon Drum
mond Lake, near the centre of the swamp,
a hotel, which was considered a sort of
Gretna Green for the contamination of
runaway matches.
Nature, as Horace would say, is pretty
we'll run out of the place with a fork-or
canals and railroad iron. But as you
ride through the dreary underwood of
the forest in a skiff, you can easily con-
ceive yet that the demands of Southern
civilization, for several centuries, will
hardly claim the Dismal Swamp for agri-
culture.
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