Colonel William E. Byrd, the colonial ancestor of Virginia's Senator Harry F. Byrd, named the place the Great Dismal Swamp. After trekking through the muck and mire with a band of hardy surveyors, Byrd emerged bug-bitten almost to death (the Dismal Swamp's yellow fly, they still say, will politely lift a man's hat from his head so as to get a better bite at his ears). The swamp, straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border, just across the James River Bay from Norfolk, was nothing better than a "filthy bogg," he wrote. Even birds...
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