Dana Vacca's Blog: Freedom Calling A Civil War Slave Escapes By Sea - Posts Tagged "dismal-swamp"

FREEDOM CALLING - Book Highlights

The strange and mysterious Great Dismal Swamp, located in southeastern Virginia / northeastern North Carolina, is a fascinating place and is seen up close and personal as the story of Daisy and Celia unfolds! The swamp is steeped in Native American legend and early American folklore. When I began researching this wild and unusual area, I found it had been home to various peoples for over 13,000 years. Coastal Native Americans lived there until the seventeenth century. In the eighteen and nineteenth centuries it became a refuge for escaped slaves, runaways, outlaws, and fugitives who wanted to find freedom outside mainstream society. This expanse of wilderness is an inhospitable, harsh environment that has never completely bent to the hand of man. Though smaller in size, it still remains today, an ancient and primordial no man's land.

EXCERPT: "Cypress roots poked up through the mud. Some resembled sharpened stakes, pointed and menacing. Others like gravestones in a long-forgotten cemetery, leaned eerily: - lifeless, solemn and forlorn. Still more, like herds of disfigured creatures or the spawn of sinister abominations, rose up from the unholy black water and stood staring - motionless and tall."

(see pics of the Dismal Swamp's cypress; click link below)
https://www.facebook.com/CivilWarHist...