Dismal Swamp Canal Company  stock certificate 1871 (Virginia - North Carolina)

Very rare historic canal company certificate. Nice side vignette of men working a canal lock with barges and towpath horses. Issued and not cancelled. Dated 1871. Measures approximately 10 x 7.5 inches.

The private Dismal Swamp Canal Company was chartered in 1784 to build a 22-mile waterway connecting Virginia's Elizabeth River to North Carolina's Pasquotank River. Co-founded by investors including George Washington, the company used grueling manual labor by enslaved people to dig the historic canal between 1793 and 1805.

By about 1805, the canal was complete, but only small boats could traverse its course. The company finally turned a profit in 1810 from lumbering and in 1814 was reincorporated as the Dismal Swamp Land Company.

The canal was in use during the War of 1812. In 1826, recognizing the canal’s unrealized potential and strategic importance, Virginia and Federal governments bought shares of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company for improvement and expansion. By 1828, the canal opened to commercial traffic and could accommodate schooners and other small ships. Between 1839 and the beginning of the Civil War, it was widened and deepened. The locks were improved with masonry, enabling larger boats such as passenger boats, freighters, and stern-wheel steamboats, to pass through.

Following the Civil War the Dismal Swamp Canal suffered great financial turmoil. The State of Virginia, bankrupt after the war, was forced to sell its stock in the Dismal Swamp Canal Company for a fraction of its value. Stopgap repairs were made to the canal to keep it functional. However, the Dismal Swamp Canal Company remained in financial ruin and in 1877 was facing bankruptcy.

Competition from the newer Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal in the late 1850s and later the railroads siphoned away commercial shipping profits. Between 1896 and 1899, the masonry locks were replaced with timber ones. During the Civil War, the canal fell into disrepair but it reopened in 1899.

Originally owned by the Dismal Swamp Canal Company, the canal was sold to the Lake Drummond Canal and Water Company in 1892, making major improvements and cutting locks. On March 30, 1929, the federal government acquired the canal for $500,000. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now supervises it. Today, the Dismal Swamp Canal is nineteen miles long, sixty feet wide, and at a controlling depth of nine feet. The canal is the oldest continually operated artificial canal in the United States and forms part of the modern Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

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