In May 1763, a young George Washington rode into the Great Dismal Swamp and saw not a wasteland but an opportunity. He proposed draining the swamp and cutting a north-south canal through it, connecting the waters of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia to the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. The colonial communities around the landlocked Carolina sounds were entirely dependent on shipping across poor overland tracks or along the treacherous Atlantic coast to reach markets through Norfolk. A canal would change everything. Washington would eventually agree with Virginia governor Patrick Henry that canals were the surest path to efficient internal transportation. In 1784, the Dismal Swamp Canal Company was formed. Work began in 1793. The canal was dug entirely by hand, and most of the labor was performed by enslaved people rented from nearby landowners. Twelve years of brutal toil through swamp, muck, and stifling heat followed before the 22-mile waterway finally opened in 1805.

During the Civil War, the Dismal Swamp Canal occupied a dangerous strategic position between Union and Confederate forces. In April 1862, word reached Union General Ambrose Burnside that the Confederates might use the canal to move an ironclad warship from Hampton Roads to the Albemarle Sound. Burnside dispatched General Jesse Reno with 3,000 troops from Roanoke Island to destroy the Culpepper Locks near South Mills. Reno's men disembarked near Elizabeth City on April 18 and began an exhausting overland march. At South Mills, they met Confederate Colonel Ambrose Wright and his 900 defenders, who held the road to town. Four hours of determined fighting ended when the Confederate artillery commander, Captain W. W. McComas, was killed and Wright fell back two miles to Joy's Creek. But Reno, bloodied and spent, did not pursue. Hearing rumors of Confederate reinforcements arriving from Norfolk, he ordered a silent nighttime retreat to the transports. The Battle of South Mills cost an estimated 114 Union and 25 Confederate casualties -- the only battle fought near the canal, and one that changed nothing.

The Great Dismal Swamp and its canal carried a meaning far beyond commerce. The swamp's dense, nearly impenetrable thickets became a sanctuary for people escaping slavery. Freedom seekers fled into the swamp's interior, some living there for years in maroon communities hidden from pursuers. The canal itself, running through the heart of this wilderness, served as a corridor along the Underground Railroad. Today, the canal and the surrounding Great Dismal Swamp are officially recognized as part of the Underground Railroad, a designation acknowledging the courage of those who found freedom through a landscape that most white settlers considered fit only for draining. The irony is sharp: the canal that George Washington envisioned as an instrument of commerce, built by the labor of enslaved people, became a lifeline for those seeking to escape the very institution that built it.

After the Civil War left the canal in disrepair, the Lake Drummond Canal and Water Company launched restoration efforts in 1892. Vessels carrying lumber, shingles, farm products, and passengers soon made the canal a bustling interstate thoroughfare again. But by the 1920s, railroads and highways had overtaken water transport, and commercial traffic dwindled. In 1929, the federal government purchased the canal for $500,000. The waterway found new purpose in the mid-twentieth century as recreational boating surged and the canal became part of the Intracoastal Waterway, offering shelter from the brutal Atlantic coast. Hurricane Matthew dealt another blow in October 2016, filling the canal with silt and sand. Even after dredging was completed in November 2017, an invasion of duckweed -- a tiny floating plant that chokes boat engine intakes -- forced another closure. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finally reopened the canal in March 2018. Today, about 2,000 recreational boaters transit it each year.

The Dismal Swamp Canal is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. The East Coast Greenway, a 3,000-mile trail system connecting Maine to Florida, runs along part of the canal trail. The Dismal Swamp Canal Visitor Center, located in Camden County, North Carolina, on US Highway 17 just south of the Virginia border, holds the distinction of being the only visitor center in the continental United States that greets visitors arriving by both a major highway and a historic waterway. The canal remains one of two inland routes connecting the Chesapeake Bay to the Albemarle Sound. Its waters are still and dark, stained the color of tea by juniper and cypress tannins leaching from the swamp. It is a quiet place now, but the canal remembers everything: Washington's ambition, the enslaved hands that dug it, the soldiers who fought over it, and the people who followed its dark corridor to freedom.