A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



On many of my forays onto coastal 

 waterways, I've been extremely fortunate 

 to have my brother Richard Cecelski as a 

 guide. Richard is the founder and director of 

 Carolina Ocean Studies, an environmental 

 education group that conducts wonderful 

 field trips for schoolchildren from Carolina 

 Beach and Beaufort. Richard is also one of 

 the most expert swamp guides in all of 

 North Carolina. He has an unusually good 

 feel for our coastal swamps and tidewater 

 creeks. It's been a privilege — as well as a 

 lot of fun — to learn from him. 



Richard has a keen eye for the human 

 relics that one finds even in the most remote 

 swamps. A tar pit indicates a site where 

 naval stores had been produced, hence 

 where a longleaf pine forest once stood. 

 A tangle of narrow-gauge railroad track 

 reveals that the swamp forest had been 

 timbered, almost certainly during the period 

 from 1880 to 1920. During those years, 

 Northern timber companies 

 that had already depleted the 

 old-growth forests of New 

 England and the Great Lakes 

 swept through our coastal 

 forests like locusts. And 

 when we stumble upon a 

 sunken shad boat on a creek 

 off the Alligator River or a 

 hand-hewn bow net hidden 

 along the White Oak River, 

 we know we've discovered 

 traces of a springtime fishery 

 that was the largest in the 

 state in the late 19th century. 



The canals that pass through coastal 

 swamps also reveal a great deal about the 

 past. Sometimes all you notice is a narrow, 

 all-too-straight line of visibility through a 

 cypress swamp, but you can bet it's an old 

 canal once used to float white oak timbers, 

 cypress shingles or cedar staves to a mill. 

 Along intertidal marshes, I've inadvertently 

 paddled into a labyrinth of intersecting, 

 narrow canals, a sign of rice cultivation in 

 the 18th or 19th centuries, when large gangs 

 of slaves cultivated the "golden grain" 

 along the Lower Cape Fear. I've also 

 followed other, larger canals in places like 



Lake Phelps and Lake Mattamuskeet that 

 date to the late 1 8th and early 19th 

 centuries, when slaves dug canals to drain 

 swampland for agriculture and to raft goods 

 to market. 



In my travels, I've been to even larger 

 canals, known as ships' canals, that bring to 

 life the golden age of canal building in 

 America between the American Revolution 



\1n liai'l llaliiiiutki 



and the Civil War. During that period, 

 many political leaders believed that ships' 

 canals held the greatest promise for 

 overcoming the navigational hazards of 

 North Carolina's shallow sounds and 

 dangerous, shifting inlets. Between 1794 

 and 1805, for example, slaves dug the 22- 

 mile-long Dismal Swamp Canal to serve as 

 a shipping route between the Albemarle 

 Sound and Chesapeake Bay and to skirt the 

 dangerous swash and bar at Ocracoke Inlet. 



Antiquated by the opening of the 

 Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal in 1859, 

 the Dismal Swamp Canal has had lasting 

 consequences that have nothing to do with 



shipping. The canal blocked the Great 

 Dismal Swamp's natural flow from west to 

 east, eventually drying up the vast wetlands 

 east of the canal and opening them for 

 agriculture. The canal also lowered water 

 levels throughout the moister parts of the 

 Great Dismal, drying out the highly 

 combustible upper layers of peat during 

 summer droughts. Even as early as 1 860, 

 unprecedentedly hot peat fires had burned 

 much of the old-growth forests of cypress, 

 juniper and gum in the Great Dismal. 



Millponds also have a story to tell. 

 Quite often, Richard and I stumble upon 

 old millponds along remote blackwater 

 creeks. We frequently discover relics of the 

 mill's dam or foundation. Being on a 

 millpond, I find it easier to imagine what 

 much of our coastal landscape would have 

 looked like in the period from the 

 Revolutionary era well into the 20th 

 century, when millponds could be found in 

 „,„, every coastal community. 



Local people dammed 

 creeks and harnessed the 

 water's flow to power 

 sawmills as well as 

 gristmills that provided 

 flour and cornmeal. 



I spent one of the best 

 days of my life paddling in 

 Merchants Millpond, 

 formed late in the 18th 

 century when a group of 

 Gates County merchants 

 dammed Lassiter Swamp. 

 Today it's part of a state park that rents 

 canoes and campsites to the general public. 



More often, though, I go to Morton's 

 Millpond near my family's homeplace. I 

 usually paddle north along the Harlowe 

 and Clubfoot Creek Canal and arrive at the 

 old millpond an hour or two before 

 twilight. An osprey will still be fishing at 

 that hour, and I'm likely to see wood 

 ducks, herons and maybe a gallinule or two 

 before they settle down for the night. The 

 place is bursting with life: dragonflies and 

 lightning bugs, fish hitting the water and 

 often an otter or muskrat. 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 29 



