A combination tour guide and ecological primer of the Delaware Valley.

Freshwater marshes are found throughout the United States and in many countries around the world. And in every marsh, there is an opportunity to view dozens of species of animal life. Written in a rhyming cumulative style like The House that Jack Built, At the Marsh in the Meadow portrays the wetlands food chain, showing how all forms of life, from the mud at the bottom of the marsh to the birds in the sky, are directly connected to their marsh home. Author Jeanie Mebane has worked with the National Park Service and U. S. Forest Service, and has lived near or worked at marshes from Florida to Arizona and Alaska.

The foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement; however, what may have impeded the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

Contains proceedings.

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