Comfortably Numb: The Price They Paid

Like many of us here on the Southshore, I descend from Scottish and Irish stock. Few of us are aware of this because our Celtic culture was purposely suppressed by the English, who also settled in this area. The attack on Celtic culture is nothing new to the Celts; from thousands of years ago, the Romans, the Scandinavian nations, and the English have all attempted to erase us from the planet, and yet, we survive. When the English settled this continent, they chose for themselves much of the high, dry land in New England and Virginia. The Irish and the Scots were settled in the less desirable swamps on the Southshore of the Albemarle Sound and in the mountains on the western side of our great state. The land that the English crown granted to the Irish and Scots had a specific purpose; placing the Celts between the towns and farms of the English settlers and the Native American populations created a buffer zone, a kind of defense against Native American hostility. So how did these Irish and Scottish settlers react to the less-than-favorable conditions from the English? They went to work and built the farms and towns we see around us today.

There are those who will tell you that these farms all around us were built off the backs of slave labor, and I find that statement interesting. Only one in four of the original settlers of the Southshore actually owned slaves. Let’s put that into perspective: it is said that 12 families originally settled Tyrrell County. That means that of those 12 farms, nine of them were carved out of the swamps without the benefit of slave labor. I seriously doubt that any of the few white settlers who owned slaves were sitting on their porches, drinking mint juleps while their slaves were draining and clearing the land. I can tell you with some certainty that the majority of farms along the Southshore of the Albemarle Sound were small, single-family subsistence farms, created and maintained by the men and their families who lived on the land.

Have you ever hiked through the vast swampy wilderness here on the Southshore? You might just as likely travel across this terrain in a boat as on foot, since much of our beloved land is underwater. There is one thought that always comes to my mind as I sit in the middle of our swamps and enjoy the peace and tranquility of that solitude: “What kind of man brings his family into this place, determined to carve out a farm?”

We go about our lives here on the Southshore, driving our automobiles and sitting in the comfort of our air-conditioned homes, and rarely give thought to our ancestors who first settled in this region. Imagine, if you will, a man who chose to leave the only home he has ever known to sail across a vast and often violent Atlantic Ocean, step off that ship and climb into another boat, sail and row into this swampy land, and envision a farm that he would someday spend the rest of his days working. The first step in this endeavor would require the man to dig miles of ditches by hand, with a shovel, to drain the water from his land. Then this man would need to clear the land. He would have to chop down the cypress, beech, and juniper trees, most of which had been growing for hundreds of years and measured six feet across, with an axe and a handsaw, by hand, remove all the limbs from the trunk, and then drag the logs to a river where they could be transported to a sawmill. Then the man would have to burn away all the brush and weeds. After that, the man would walk for months behind a plow being pulled by his horse or oxen. Now, as if all this was not enough to deter any modern mortal man, all the while this man is working to drain and clear his 200-acre farm, he is exposed to attacks from alligators, bears, and hostile Indians. Then, if he survives those threats, he must contend with mosquitoes, malaria, dysentery, and a host of other diseases common in the swamps of eastern North Carolina, determined to kill him, and he would be carving his farm out of that swamp without the aid of central heat and air conditioning. But wait, there is more. Throughout the years, while this man has been laboring to carve out his farm, he must also provide shelter and food for his wife and children, and keep them safe from the same threats he faces.

It would never occur to most of us, as we sit quietly in our kayak in the middle of the swamp, to look around and think, “I reckon I will drain this swamp and farm this land”. What strength it must have taken to forge a working farm out of these swamps, what courage it must have taken to face the dangers inherent in such an endeavor. I wonder, as I sit quietly in my kayak in the middle of these swamps, if I could possess the strength, the courage, and the will to drain this land, clear away the trees, and plow the earth, not with the aid of our modern excavators and power saws, but with my own two hands. We are the result of that man’s labor. The life that I now live, that we live here on the Southshore, is the reward of that strength, that courage, and that extraordinary will.