The web newspaper this morning has a story about finding George Washingtons childhood house. Me and George Washington go way back. We used to both used to hang out in the Great Dismal Swamp. George Washington owned it, a little before my time, but I aways went back there hiking, biking and kayaking. George Washington had ditches dug in the swamp to float lumber out, and when they dug these ditches, they put the dirt they removed right next to it, so it made a path that was up out of the swamp. When I was last there, a lot of these paths were good enough to drive a car on, others were good enough to ride a bike on, and still others were so grown over they were impassable. One in particular, called The Dismal Swamp Canal, was dug purely by slave labor. The canal when finished, was about two feet deep, and pretty worthless for boats, but that path next to it, became a very useful stage coach road through the otherwise impassable swamp. Today, that stage coach road is a four lane highway called US Route 17. A few years after it was ‘completed’ they dug the canal deeper, and later it became part of the Intra Coastal Waterway.
I have a house in the US that’s very close to the north end of the Washington Ditch, in the north side of the swamp. My house is in Deep Creek, in Chesapeake Virginia. I heard the name Deep Creek was given by George Washington, but I can’t prove it. Also I was told that the very last resistance of the US Civil War was very close to my house in Deep Creek, when the last of the last few rebel fighters ran off into the swamp, but again, I haven’t tried verify it.
One of my old neighbors, (named after John Wayne) was real mad one day, because historians were on his property, digging little holes every few feet. It was kind of funny, because they weren’t really hurting anything, just trespassing and digging little holes. They found Civil War era musket balls and belt buckles.

Right now, there is a fire in the Great Dismal Swamp
I could talk all day about the Swamp.