Lake of the Great Dismal: a Machine-Readable Transcription

Library of Congress Lake of the Great Dismal THE LAKE OF THE GREAT DISMAL BY CHARLES FREDERICK STANSBURY WITH A PREFACE BY DON MARQUIS ALBERT & CHARLES BONI NEW YORK 1925 F232 I7S7 Copyright, 1924 BY ALBERT & CHARLES BONI PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK FEB 12 '25 ©ClA823108 no. 1. TO MY FRIEND CAPTAIN WILLIAM R. BOUTWELL vii PREFACE Charles Frederick Stansbury was born in London, England, on November 3, 1854; but his parents were Americans. He died in 1922, on the 12th of May. It was my privilege to know him during the last eight or nine years of his life, and his was one of the most winsome and charming personalities I ever came in contact with. He had an invincible sweetness of nature, which ill health, disappointment, hard luck and the world's neglect could not vanquish. When I have felt down and out, over nothing at Lake of the Great Dismal http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.05093 Library of Congress all, he has cheered me up and made me ashamed of myself with his gentle humor and whimsicality. I think he was a melancholy man; but he never permitted his melancholy to depress his friends. I speak of his ill luck and poor health and disappointment. One of the horrors of the profession of journalism is that so many able men outlive their success. They achieve success, they go along successfully for years, well and widely known, and then old age overtakes them; there is a gradual decline of the ability to produce speedily great quantities of “copy”; they lose their audiences; younger generations of writers, younger generations of readers come crowding along. One day they wake up to the sad viii fact that they and their honorable records have been forgotten by all but a few old timers. They have outlived most of their contemporaries and newer men (getting ready to tread the same road) do not know them at all. This is the story of the typical journalist; the story of ninety-nine of us out of every hundred. “Stan,” as we used to call him along Park Row, achieved success, and was successful for many years, known and noted and successful; and in the end, age overtook him, and physical disabilities. During the last few years of his life the “pals” grew fewer and fewer who had companioned with him in his days of glory. A lot of newspaper veterans to whom this sort of thing happens are apt to turn into bores and grouches; but “Stan” never did. After his success he did not fall into failure; he went along with another kind of success, an unworldly sort of success; the success of an old man who has won the love and affection of his world to such an extent that they don't care a damn whether he has a dollar in his pocket or not. Stansbury went to California at the age of twenty, and from there to Hawaii and to Samoa. From Samoa he went to Australia in 1879 where he went into newspaper work. He was editor and publisher of a weekly paper called The Lantern in Adelaide for four or five years, then he went to London; for two years he practiced his profession there, and in 1888 returned to the United States. He was a reporter, a ix special feature writer, an editorial Lake of the Great Dismal http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.05093 Library of Congress writer, a song writer and the author of many short stories and essays, numerous poems and a couple of novels. “Kittiwake,” published in 1912, I think is the best of his writings. It shows his style at its best; it shows his love of nature and his gentle whimsical humor. I think he might have been a naturalist, if he had followed one of his bents. The Dismal Swamp of Virginia always held for him great interest and fascination. He devoted many years of his life exploring and collecting material. After his death there was found among his effects a note requesting that the manuscript be handed to his old friend and pal of many years, A. E. Baermann; he having faith that “Abe” would find a publisher for it. Stansbury realized that a book of this description would not appeal to the masses, and might not be a good business proposition for a publisher. His faith in his friend was well founded, as is proved by this published volume. Stansbury was a scholar, much more of a scholar than the average American newspaper man. He knew the best of the literatures of half a dozen countries, and he always kept up with the latest literary movements; also he tried to keep me up with them, bringing me books that he considered promising or significant of new tendencies, almost as soon as they were published. And this, I began to understand after a while, was a lovely and touching thing for him to do; for he was frequently “broke” in his later x years, and these books must have cost him money that he needed badly for something else. But that was the kind of old dear “Stan” always was—he would spend his last cent for a book, and go without a meal to get it; and then he would give the book itself away to a friend who, he thought, might enjoy it. And if his friend did enjoy it, he would sit and glow and expand in the communion of thought and spirit thus established or confirmed. I wish I had the material to write more about his life—I do not mean facts concerning this paper or that paper for which he worked, nor the names and dates of publications of his various volumes; I have all that. I mean, I should like to know in detail just how he lived and got along the last five years of his existence. I should have the material for a real Lake of the Great Dismal http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.05093 Library of Congress memoir, instead of a hasty note like this—indeed, the material for a novel; for I suspect that in these last five years he used to have some pretty hard times. He would drift in to see me after an absence of a week or two with some book he thought I should read, with all the quiet cheerfulness of a person who has not a worry in the world, and no task except to expel the worries of others—and maybe the book itself would represent what should have been yesterday's dinner. But no one could ever be so impertinent as to inquire too curiously just how “Stan” was getting along; combined with his gentleness and humor was a native dignity, a very real dignity, which forbade curiosity. He preferred to put, and keep xi his associations on an intellectual plane; he would not associate with any one with whom he could not associate on that basis. “Stan” met victoriously, in his last years, one of the most difficult tests to Which a human being can be put—although he might be broke financially, it was always he who conferred something upon his friends; it was he who gave them something valuable and unusual; it was he who condescended; it was he who was the donor always; and the thing that he gave, so quietly and continuously, was himself, his rare and unusual self. He was, to the end, the gentleman and the aristocrat, conferring benefits upon others, and through whatever overlay of circumstances, the fact that he was a gentleman and an aristocrat shone through triumphantly. Don Marquis. xiii CONTENTS PAGE Thomas Moore and the Great Dismal Swamp 3 In Spring 13 Lake of the Great Dismal http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.05093 Library of Congress In Summer 43 In Autumn 79 In Winter 89 Animal and Planet Life 95 Human Documents 137 Geography and Geology 221 A Dive into the Great Dismal 229 xv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Thomas Moore 6 Cypress trees, Lake Drummond 22 Characteristic trees of Dismal Swamp 36 Jericho Ditch 46 Old barn at Wallaceton 64 “Tangled juniper” on Lake Drummond 75 Midwinter sunset, Lake Drummond 90 House on Main Street, Norfolk 176 Lake of the Great Dismal http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.05093 Library of Congress THOMAS MOORE AND THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP 3 THOMAS MOORE AND THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP “My boat is on the shore, My bark is on the sea, But before I go, Tom Moore, Here's a double health to thee!” —BYRON Although the famous “Colonel William Evelyn Byrd of Westover, Virginia, Esqre.,” wrote in 1725 the first coherent and intelligible account of the region, no essay on the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia would be complete without a direct allusion to the fact that it was Thomas Moore, the poet, who first made it famous wherever the English language is read or spoken. The ballad of “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” was written by Moore after a visit to the Swamp in 1803. It was written in a tavern on Main Street in Norfolk on the night that the poet returned from the Swamp. The building in which the famous poem was written is still standing, having seen many changes since the days when it housed its distinguished guest. Well known and much quoted as the ballad is, it has never become trite or hackneyed, except in the immediate vicinage of the Swamp itself where it has, perhaps, through constant reiteration 4 somewhat outworn its welcome.

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