Lakes come and go, and life goes on

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Lakes come and go, and life goes on
Farmers love the swamps and fight them constantly
BY DAVID BRACKEN - Staff Writer

NEW HOLLAND -- It's been nearly 80 years since investors abandoned their effort to drain Lake Mattamuskeet and farm the rich soil of the lake bed.

Once a commercial farm that produced 15-foot stalks of corn, the 40,000-acre lake has been reclaimed by a bonanza of fish that swim in its shallow waters and waterfowl that return each winter to nibble at corn and wild celery in nearby fields.

That people once felt the need to drain North Carolina's largest lake says much about life in the lowlands of Hyde and Beaufort counties, a waterlogged region where residents often joke that a man's ditch is more important than his wife.


The 1939 Federal Writers' Project's "Guide to the Old North State" notes that in this corner of North Carolina "swamps make much of this land impractical for farming." Thanks to all those ditches, though, the area is now home to 90,000 acres of some of most productive farmland in the country.

A summer visit to New Holland is a bit like stepping into a greenhouse, albeit one with lots of bugs.

"We've got every fly and biting insect known to man," confirms Mark Dodge, 50, a lifelong Hyde County resident who owns a mosquito-infested boatyard just off U.S. 264.

This land is flat, most of it between three and five feet above sea level, and the soil is rich and black. When it rains a lot it floods a lot, which necessitates the digging of ditches and the constant clearing and reclearing of land.

"Everybody has a ditch," said Alice Keeney, Hyde County's head of planning and economic development.

Kenney says she cuts her grass three times a week in the summer, a regimen that seems about right given the profusion of vines climbing through the windows of abandoned buildings.

The 1939 guide mentions only two swamps by name, Hell Swamp and East Dismal Swamp. Both were in Beaufort County on the outskirts of Yeatesville, a tiny town whose population appears to have dwindled significantly from the 450 recorded in the 1930s.

It turns out Hell and East Dismal are not easy places to find. To learn what became of them, you can stop at Keech's, a breakfast joint and grocery along U.S. 264 that's been around about 60 years.

Cycle of the swamps

According to Van Daw, a farmer whose wife runs Keech's, and Richard Noble, a retiree and frequent patron, East Dismal was drained in the late 1970s and converted to farmland. Hell Swamp was once drained but is now being reverted to 1,300 acres of wetlands by PCS Phosphate, the outfit that operates an open-pit mining operation across the Pamlico River in Aurora.

"It's going back to the way it was," said Daw, 58.

Noble, 68, owns property at the edge of what used to be East Dismal Swamp and still bemoans the loss of what he considered a fishing and crabbing paradise.

"I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," he said. "I'm a swamp man."

Swamps haven't had a lot of advocates through much of American history, as seen in the efforts to drain Lake Mattamuskeet. They were long considered breeding grounds for various diseases, prompting federal and local governments to adopt policies aimed at draining them.

The North Carolina legislature approved the creation of the Mattamuskeet Drainage District in 1909, an act that led to the initial draining of the lake in 1916. The water was channeled through canals to a coal-powered pumping plant, then lifted and dumped into Outfall Canal, a seven-mile trench dug to Pamlico Sound.

At its peak, the pumping plant was moving 1.2 million gallons of water per minute. Coal to run the plant was hauled in on a 35-mile railroad line crossed the lake bed.

Although nothing on that scale has been seen since, the amount of swampland drained and farmed around the lake has risen sharply since the 1950s thanks to improvements in digging and land-clearing equipment. Over the last decade, new wetland rules and conservation programs have helped reclaim some of that land.

Rich in soil and wildlife

To visit Hyde County now is to be struck by how desolate it is. The 612-square-mile county has just 5,100 residents, about half the population of Knightdale.

Mac Gibbs Jr., a Hyde County agricultural extension agent, said most owners turn their farmland over to larger operators; just 43 farmers are responsible for cultivating the county's 90,000 acres.

The region's soil, pure black and almost like compost, gets much of its fertility from its ability to retain moisture.

"It's some of the most fertile land in the country," Gibbs said. "As far as cotton, they say the Mississippi Delta is the only thing that will beat it."

The lure of phenomenal yields led developers to drain Lake Mattamuskeet three times between 1916 and 1926. The last private owners of the lake farmed it for five years before going bust in 1932 during the Great Depression. With the pumps stopped, the lake filled naturally with rainfall and runoff.

The federal government bought the property and two years later declared the lake a national wildlife refuge. The pumping plant was converted into a hunting lodge, which closed in 1974 but is now being restored by the state.

Today, Lake Mattamuskeet has become a place valued for what it is and not what it could be. Each winter, bird watchers and hunters flock to the refuge and the hundreds of private shooting grounds that ring the lake.

The winter tourism dollars are a much-needed economic boost in a place whose beauty is often overlooked.

"We got the technology now to drain that lake and farm it just like we're farming any other land around here," Gibbs said.

"I think it's great that it's a lake."