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LAKE MATTAMUSKEET

© 2000 James David Pearce

Eastern North Carolina, when viewed from the air, is covered mostly by water, with a lot of the remainder covered by old-growth forests.

Hyde County is a very large county, by far the largest in Eastern NC. And Hyde County, which had a population of about 10,000 in 1910 and has a population of about 5,000 today, has very, very little dry land.

A lot of Hyde's water is in the "sound," a large mix of fresh and salt water separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a long string of narrow islands. But a big piece of Hyde is fresh water, ponded in a place called Lake Mattamuskeet, a visual jewel set on the cusp of God's Country.

For someone who has never seen it, Lake Mattamuskeet requires a lot of description. It is more than 12 miles long, about seven miles wide, and a "swan's neck deep." In winter months, this 84 square miles of shimmering beauty is literally covered with thousands upon thousands of whistling swans, seeking southern shelter from somewhere in the frozen north.

And the lake, as broad as it is, has relatively little water. It actually is only about 30 inches deep, rarely more than 36 inches deep anywhere ~ 84 square miles of perfection for a hungry swan who can sit on the surface and dip his long neck to feed from the bottom.

No rivers and no creeks flow into Lake Mattamuskeet. It is simply a large low piece of land that collects and holds rainwater.

Now, Lake Mattamuskeet is divided into two sections, because somewhere back in time, a railroad causeway was built straight across the seven-mile width. In the automotive age, this causeway became a narrow roadway, which sits about four feet above the water's surface.

When the causeway was built, it created problems of its own, because the shallow lake wasn't inclined to let it stay there. To get around this, engineers placed a series of culverts along the entire seven-mile stretch of causeway.

As area residents explain it, the culverts themselves brought more problems.

The wind blows a lot in this area of North Carolina, and in some storms in some seasons it tends to blow really hard.

Most of the storm systems moving up the coast in the fall have a circular pattern. When the leading edge of the storm approaches, the wind blows from the east. As the storm drifts northward, the wind moves around and blows from the west.

As the residents tell it, when the wind comes out of the east for any appreciable length of time, it pushes all the water in the two sections of the lake up against their western edges, leaving the eastern edges ~ not dry ~ but with no noticeable water.

At the causeway, this means the water level drops on the western side and is raised on the eastern side. Since this situation violates laws of fluid dynamics, the piled-up water on the eastern side rushes through the culverts as fast as it can to fill the hole to the west.

A few hours later, as the storm system moves north, the situation is reversed, with the water piled up on the western side of the causeway rushing to find its way east through the culverts.

At times, this phenomenon almost completely empties one section of Mattamuskeet while deepening the other, and vice versa.

And all the water rushing through the culverts creates more problems, because the continuing scouring effect digs massive holes at both ends of the culverts, creating a dangerous anomaly in the average depth of the water in the lake.

The result is a situation where if you inadvertently drive off the causeway into one of these holes, you'd quickly find yourself completely submerged in a knee-deep lake.

The land around Lake Mattamuskeet is unbelievably fertile, and many of the early settlers in Eastern NC often turned an envious eye on the huge, shallow lake itself, seeing its muddy bottom as possible valuable farmland where the tall corn would grow without the least bit of fertilizing.

Draining the state's largest lake was in no way against the law back then, when wetlands were seen more as hindrances than as natural needs or assets.

The state decided to drain it and plant it, but was hard put to figure how to start. Private enterprise stepped into partnership with the state in 1911 with the idea of making a buck or two on the deal, and after digging a lot of miles of canals and constructing a lot of water-lifting paraphernalia, almost managed to get the job done. The drainage plan was patterned after some of the great work the Dutch had done around the Zuider Zee, and the settlement that developed around the process was named "New Holland," although only a handful of Hollanders actually were involved in the job.

The first two companies working at the task mired down in a slippery combination of Hyde County muck and shaky national finance.

The bottom of the thing is only two or three feet below sea-level, and the sea isn't that far away. Just about as fast as the pumpers pumped, rain and seepage would conspire to muddy things up again.

But the entrepreneurs refused to give up, and sometime in the '20s, they managed to get the water table low enough to start running tractors up and down the rows. By the end of that decade, it was about as pretty a piece of agricultural work as any farmer had ever seen.

There were smiling faces all around when the corn and beans started coming along.

But the Great Depression was at hand, and wasn't to be denied. Soon, the New Hollanders couldn't even give away the corn and beans, much less sell them.

When the dead-market situation stretched into the early 1930s, they shut down their expensive pumping stations, and the water quickly seeped back into the lake.

When bankruptcy came, the place became the property of the U.S. government and was proclaimed a migratory waterfowl refuge. Later it became prime hunting country for people who liked to take home dead geese, ducks and deer.

The hunting of geese was ended first, and gradually more restrictions were imposed on the hunters until today only limited deer and duck hunting are allowed under a lottery system.

Now the whole thing is a national wildlife refuge.

And nobody messes with Mattamuskeet now, except the swans, the geese and the ducks.