After years of planning and gathering funding, city leaders cut the ribbon on the Historical Village at the Dismal Swamp this week.
Located off George Washington Highway South along the Dismal Swamp Canal Trail, the exhibits each share a piece of the swamp’s role in Virginia history.
The project was funded locally and by state and federal grants. It began with the renovation of the Cornland School, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1902 for Black students, which reopened as a museum in 2024.
Mildred Brown, an alumna of the Cornland School, helped cut the ribbon to open the village. She and other members of the Cornland School Foundation, including Chesapeake councilmember Ella Ward, aided in the effort to transform and preserve the structure.
“History really is not just in the books,” Chesapeake Mayor Rick West said at the ceremony. “It’s more alive when you can come to a place like this and read about and understand the way that lives were led and the sacrifices that were made to make this city as great as it is.”
Next to the school, inside the village’s visitor center, a timeline traces the narrative of the Dismal Swamp, from pre-colonization to its time as a stop in the Underground Railroad. Visitors can read about the canal’s role in local commerce and see models of vessels that sailed down it.
The center also includes artifacts from the nearby Superintendent’s House, which was once used to collect tolls from boats traveling through the canal but is now federally owned. The city is working on getting the property transferred to open the site to the public, similar to the Cornland School.
Jessica Cosmas, Chesapeake’s Historical Services Manager, said her team chose to highlight several main themes throughout the exhibits using historical documents including newspapers, land and deed records and research.
“We touch on, you know, what may be called like ‘difficult history’ or ‘hard history,’” Cosmas said. “How can we introduce those topics, you know, to the general public in a way that is accessible and hopefully can start a dialogue?”
Cosmas said she worked with the Nansemond Indian Nation to collect information about how indigenous communities lived in the swamp and continue to connect with it. In the future, she said the city hopes to add another outdoor exhibit focused on their stories.
The village’s Maroon Communities outdoor exhibit is a recreation of a dwelling based on an illustration from the 1850s. Maroon communities were formed by previously enslaved African or African American individuals who self-emancipated and created settlements in the swamp.
The swamp also played a role as a temporary refuge for enslaved people who escaped as a part of the Underground Railroad. In the village’s exhibit dedicated to the railroad, metal trees and leaf panels to form a tunnel set with silhouettes of men, women and children. The silhouettes are based on images from newspapers and other historic documents.
The city is planning to add an outdoor classroom to the site in the fall.
The Historical Village is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m, seven days a week.
