This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

On the border of Virginia and North Carolina near the eastern shoreline,

stretches a great dismal swamp. The great dismal swamp, actually, that's the name British

colonists have given it by the early 1700s. The swamp covers about 190 square miles today,

but at its peak before parts of it were drained and developed, it was around 10 times bigger,

spanning roughly 2000 square miles of Virginia and North Carolina.

That's our own Sharifusive. And it's understandable why people call the swamp dismal.

Temperatures can reach over 100 degrees, it's humid and soggy, filled with thorns and thickets.

Oh yes, it's quite dismal, they named it, I think, somewhat appropriately.

That's Eric Shepard. He lives in Carrollton, Virginia, and he runs a company that leads tourists

to the great dismal swamp, which is teaming with all sorts of dangerous and unpleasant wildlife.

You still have black bear and some of the poisonous snakes and yellow flies and mosquitoes,

I mean, you still have the hazards there in the swamp.

And even if you go in with a compass and a map, it's easy to get lost.

But hundreds of years ago, before the Civil War, the dangers of the swamp and its seeming

impenetrability actually attracted a lot of people, including one of Shepard's ancestors,

who was enslaved in the region.

I've read information that approximately 50,000 escaped Africans went through and or lived

in the dismal swamp. That's a lot of people to come to there.

Despite all its predators and bugs, all its thorns and vines, all its dismalness and swampiness,

this land was home to generations of people. It was the site of one of the most remarkable and

least told stories of resistance to slavery in the United States.

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