A HISTORIAN'S COAST 



In the Great Alligator Swamp 



By David Cecelski • Photographs courtesy of the Hubert Ambrose Collection, Outer Banks History Center 



Early this 

 March. I 

 disappeared 

 into the Great 

 Alligator 

 Swamp.* After 

 being cooped 

 up all winter, I 

 needed to get 

 into the wild. 

 At the first hint 

 of spring. I 

 drove to the 

 Alligator River 

 National 

 Wildlife 

 Refuge, 

 between 

 Columbia and 

 Manteo, and 

 slipped my boat 

 into an amber- 

 red creek 

 fragrant of peat 

 and sweet bay. Only in ancient peat 

 swamps — the Dismal, the Croatan, 

 the Okefenokee — have I ever 

 smelled earth so uproariously rich in 

 life. I loaded my boat with groceries, 

 gear and extra clothes and paddled 

 into the swamp, never looking back. 



I picked the Great Alligator 

 because it's such a grand wilderness, 

 more than 1 60,000 acres of remote, 

 uninhabited swamps, hammocks and 

 lakes. But I also wanted to see what 

 remained of Buffalo City. This 

 abandoned sawmill village thrived by 



* Historically, the vast swamp 

 that covers most of mainland Dare 

 and Tyrrell counties has been called 

 by many different names, but I like 

 "Great Alligator Swamp, " a name 

 used in the 18th century. 



Skidder used by Dare Lumber Company and similar firms to haul trees to rail line 



Mill Tail Creek in the heart of the 

 swamp between 1885 and 1925. It was 

 once the largest town in Dare County 

 and boasted one of the busiest 

 sawmills in North Carolina. 



Dozens of mill towns like Buffalo 

 City sprang up in coastal North 



Carolina 

 between 1880 

 and 1920. 

 American 

 timber compa- 

 nies had 

 exhausted the 

 forests of New 

 England and the 

 Great Lakes, so 

 they moved to 

 the South. Soon 

 they logged our 

 old-growth 

 forests and 

 moved on too. 

 When the last 

 of the Atlantic 

 white cedar 

 (juniper) was 

 cut. Buffalo 

 City became a 

 ghost town. 

 As I 



paddled into the Great Alligator. I had a 

 guidebook better than all of my 

 topographical maps. My barber and 

 friend Bud Midgette, who hails from 

 Columbia in nearby Tyrrell County, 

 had recently honored me with a copy of 

 his late uncle's unpublished reminis- 

 cences. His uncle Benjamin Nathan 

 Basnight worked at Buffalo City in the 

 1920s and lived all but a few years of 

 his life around this swamp. At different 

 times, he was a logger, farmer, fisher, 

 boatbuilder and rumrunner. With his 

 reminiscences in hand — they had 

 originally been written for his grand- 

 daughter Selina Basnight Stokes in 

 1 969 — I spent several days in and 

 around the Great Alligator. 



Basnight moved to Buffalo City in 

 1922. He had been born in 1895 at ' 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 19 



