Bringing The World Home To You

© 2024 WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
120 Friday Center Dr
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
919.445.9150 | 800.962.9862
91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

The Great Dismal Swamp's Legacy As A Refuge For Runaway Slaves

Great Dismal Swamp
By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region - Photo of the Week - Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge (VA)Uploaded by AlbertHerring, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30924548
/
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

For more than a century before the Civil War, escaped slaves used the thick and shadowy brush of the Great Dismal Swamp as a hideout.

The Great Dismal Swamp stretches for thousands of acres across the northeastern corner of North Carolina and into Virginia. Escaped slaves ventured into the swampy and treacherous terrain to form resistance settlements called "maroon" communities. Archeologist Dan Sayers has traveled to the Great Dismal Swamp for more than a decade researching the area's history as a refuge for runaway slaves. Sayers highlights his work in his book "A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaves Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp" (University Press of Florida/2014). Host Frank Stasio talks with Sayers, associate professor of anthropology at American University, about the swamp's landscape and its history as a hideout. 

Stay Connected
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond is a podcast producer for WUNC.