It could be pierced and drained at any point, and reduced to natural and beautiful proportions. Its overflow, instead of constantly deluging the surrounding land, could be guided in ten thousand sparkling channels to enrich and adorn its wonderful environment.
The Lake of the Dismal Swamp is, by survey, about twenty-three feet higher than the sea, and it is not fifteen miles from tide-water, the intervening land being a level slope, and, except for the trees, exceedingly easy to channel.
And, stranger still, the channels have been dug for over one hundred years; but they are locked up at the outer ends with wooden gates.
Ponder on this marvellous fact: the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, three miles by two and one half in extent, and from seven to fifteen feet in depth, is situated on the side, and almost on the top, of a hill, beside a tidal river, and yet it creates by overflow all around it for about one thousand square miles, one of the densest and darkest morasses on the surface of the earth.
In 1763, George Washington surveyed the Dismal Swamp, and discovered that the western side was much higher than the eastern, and that rivers ran out of the swamp, and not into it. He then wrote that the swamp was "neither a plain nor a hollow, but a hill-side."
