Until recently, it was thought that the Dismal Swamp, which stretches from south Virginia through North Carolina, was a modest settlement at best, and that Maroon communities founded by runaways were rare in United States slavery. But recent archaeology has revealed it was a settlement that was sustained over generations. Literally thousands of people escaped to and lived within the swamp from the seventeenth century through the conclusion of the Civil War. It is a challenge, with the many generations of land clearing, to precisely detail the original size of the swamp, but by some estimates
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