[soft piano music] ♪ - [Elizabeth] Coming up next on "Best of Our State."

- Welcome aboard the Bonnie Blue, a classic passenger yacht just leaving Elizabeth City, bound up the Pasquotank River.

- [Elizabeth] Storyteller Bland Simpson takes a historical trip up the Great Dismal Swamp Canal.

- [Bland] The oldest continuously-used manmade waterway in America.

- [Elizabeth] And the ancient art of fresco is kept alive by Asheville artist Ben Long.

We dip into treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

[soft music] Hello, I'm Elizabeth Hudson, editor-in-chief of "Our State" magazine and your host.

At six feet deep and 22 miles long, the Dismal Swamp Canal was an aquatic interstate carved from Camden County all the way to the Chesapeake Bay.

Historian and storyteller Bland Simpson takes us along this mysterious swamp in a boat full of adventurers, runaways, and romantics.

- Welcome aboard the Bonnie Blue, a classic passenger yacht just leaving Elizabeth City bound up the Pasquotank River.

We're heading for the Intracoastal Waterway's Dismal Swamp Canal, the oldest continuously-used manmade waterway in America.

[light twangy music] Beyond the canal is a dense curtain of greens, reeds and vines, maples, white cedar, and big pines.

The eastern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, now a 14,000 acre North Carolina State Park and 111,000 acre National Wildlife Refuge in both Carolina and Virginia.

The canal looks a little different to me now than it did when I was a boy.

There's nothing about it to suggest that the canal at various times concerned Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Jackson, the Union and Confederate armies, thousands of boatmen, timbermen, truck farmers, or that it was controversial in its inception, or that its construction dragged out over decades, or that it was a dangerous, somewhat debauched avenue.

But it did and it was.

[light twangy music] William Bird first suggested digging a canal through the Great Dismal Swamp about 1730.

He thought it should go through Lake Drummond in the center of the swamp.

By the time Virginians like Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry took up the cause along with North Carolinians like Constitution-signer Hugh Williamson, the plan was to cut the canal east of the huge lake.

Virginia approved the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1787, North Carolina in 1790.

In 1793, digging began, which canal historian A.C. Brown described as a slow, nibbling process, chopping roots, bailing water, sleeping in mud.

Everyone agreed canal digging was the hardest work in the American South.

The digging from both ends toward the middle met and joined the Albemarle Sound with Chesapeake Bay in 1805.

The canal though was a little more than a muddy ditch, according to Historian Brown, only shingle flats floated over it in its earliest years.

The canal needed more water to float boats of any size.

On August 4th, 1812, a sheriff's jury appraised a 300 foot by three and a half mile strip of dismal swamp lands at a penny an acre, and then condemned it in order that a small canal, the feeder ditch could be dug to drain Lake Drummond's waters down into the main canal.

In June of 1814, James Smith's 20 ton craft came down the Roanoke River from Scotland Neck, sailed out onto Albemarle Sound, made it up the Pasquotank River, then north to Deep Creek and the south branch of the Elizabeth River.

A big Carolina boat now in Norfolk bearing bacon and brandy, the first ship had made passage through the Dismal Swamp Canal.

[soft music] [soft music] [soft music] During the Antebellum period, the Great Dismal Swamp was home to many hundreds of runaway slaves, some of whom made their ways north through this important point on the Underground Railroad.

One of the most compelling stories from that era is that of Moses Grandy, born a slave about 1786 in Camden County, he became one of the best boatmen this territory has ever known.

When the War of 1812 broke out and the British blockaded Hampton Roads and closed Chesapeake Bay, the Dismal Swap Canal became the way for moving goods into and out of the Norfolk area.

[soft twangy music] Grandy took some canal boats on shares, and as Captain Grandy, he did well, never losing one stick of timber, not one piece of freight entrusted to him.

He soon negotiated a price to buy his freedom, $600.

When Grandy paid his owner the last of that $600, the man tore up all the receipts and then sold Grandy to another man for $600.

Moses Grandy was still a slave.

Another two and a half years of boat work earned him another $600 to buy his freedom a second time.

Yet his new owner's business failed and Grandy served as payment for debt.

He was no closer to freedom than the day he was born.

Two good friends, outraged, bought Grandy and guaranteed him his freedom on repayment and Grandy kept working the canal boats, paid his friends back, and his freedom was at last secured.

Three times it had taken him, $1,800, and many a year.

It would be impossible to overstate this man's enormous spirit.

Moses Grandy was a great captain on this old canal.

[soft twangy music] On election day, 1894, a love, sick, heartbroken, young poet named Robert Frost set out by train from Massachusetts to New York City, then by steamer to Norfolk, Virginia, where he disembarked the next morning.

After he'd had breakfast, all he would eat that day, he asked the way to the Dismal Swamp.

[soft ethereal music] He was on foot, dressed only in light clothing and a thin topcoat, and it was sundown before he saw the canal.

The moon was nearly full, and Frost, fearful since childhood of the dark, trudged along toward the wilderness, stopping to lighten his grip by pitching out some clothes and a couple of books.

What would he do?

Dive in and drown in the cold waters of the canal?

Walk off into the big swamp there to lie starving against some gum tree none save he had ever seen?

Somewhere between Deep Creek and the old Northwest Locke 10 miles to the south, it must have dawned on him that his romantic suicide would have no effect on its intended audience, his beloved Eleanor White, if his body were never found, and neither she nor anyone else ever heard about it.

[light mysterious music] At Northwest Locke, about midnight that night, he boarded a small steamer bound for Elizabeth City where it laid docked most of the next day, awaiting a party of duck hunters.

This boisterous, well-provisioned liquor-swilling bunch swept him along with them to the old Nags Head Hotel.

"I was trying to throw my life away," he often said later, but instead, he walked and boated right on through the Great Dismal.

Robert Frost's swamp adventure was over and in time, he would win the two things, the one of which had driven him toward the Dismal and death, Ms. White's wife and the world's respect for him as a writer.

[lively piano music] [water sloshing] [lively piano music] [lively piano music] One of the odder craft ever on the Dismal Swamp Canal was a lumber barge outfitted back in 1913 in Washington, North Carolina, down on the Pamlico River as a 700-seat showboat, 34 feet wide, 122 feet long, she drew only 14 inches, perfect for the Sound Country's shallow waters.

The man behind it was a former circus aerialist and the craft bore his name, the James Adams Floating Theatre.

The showboat lay up winters in Elizabeth City at the wharf just below Water Street.

Come spring, James Adams' troop would kick off the new season in Elizabeth City and then a couple of 90 horse tugs the elk and the trooper would haul the showboat forth and they'd storm the Albemarle, playing Hertford, Edenton, Colerain, Winton, Murfreesboro, Plymouth, and Columbia.

[lively piano music] The James Adams Floating Theatre has the dramatic distinction of having come a cropper twice in the Intercoastal Waterway.

It hit snags and sank right here in Turner's Cut in November, 1929, again elsewhere on up the canal in 1937.

So loyal was one old trooper, septuagenarian Pop Neal, that he stayed on stage during the 1929 disaster, never leaving the watery boards once in two weeks and only coming ashore when the Floating Theatre was finally raised and righted.

On this aquatic venue, in 1924, Edna Ferber spent a week doing research for a novel.

She said there was plenty of dramatic tension.

The partying actors and actresses kept the tugboat crews awake half the night and then by day the boatman calling back and forth didn't let the performers get much sleep.

[lively piano music] Ferber titled her backstage love story "Showboat," though she set it on the Mississippi, it was really the Pamlico and the Pasquotank, and the Dismal Swamp Canal that floated the boat that caused the book that inspired the 1927 musical and Jerome Kern's enduring Ballad, "Ol' Man River."

Take it, boys.

[melancholic twangy music] [melancholic twangy music] [melancholic twangy music] [soft music] - Captivated by the beauty of the fresco's adorning church walls and palaces in France and Italy, artist Ben Long spent years in Europe studying and mastering the same technique used by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.

Fueled by passion and artistic devotion, Ben Long journeyed back to his beloved Asheville, where he dedicated his life to a noble mission, the creation of frescos in his cherished home state.

[light music] - [Narrator] There is a fascinating surprise waiting inside this otherwise ordinary looking building.

Visitors to Morganton's Performing Arts Center are astonished when they first walk in because its entrance area and gallery is home to a huge fresco.

Stunning images dance across the ceiling in glorious array, depicting the nine muses of art and literature, as well as other classical images.

This is true fresco, an art form that flowered during the Renaissance, but dates to antiquity and may have much in common with cave painting techniques from 18,000 years ago.

True fresco is living art.

The images have unusual depth and power.

They're not on the surface but have become one with the lime plaster, chemically sealed within a durable layer of calcium carbonate, which imparts to the fresco the unusual brilliance, depth, and vibrancy for which it is known.

A technique that charges the work with what appears to be an interior light.

Planning for the Muses Project began in 2003 and was largely completed by renowned North Carolina fresco artist Ben Long and his team in April of 2004.

This internationally acclaimed artist lives and works from a studio in Asheville where he also founded the Fine Arts League of Asheville, established to preserve and develop the artistic traditions of classical realism in which Long was schooled and which forms the stylistic foundation for his work today.

- But do take time to just pay attention to these, both the bones and the muscles of this figure.

- [Narrator] One of the foundations of fresco is learning to draw.

- And then when the model starts posing, you'll be warmed up.

- [Narrator] After the idea takes form in the artist's mind, sketches of the figures that will populate the fresco are created, the drawings are referred to as cartoons and they're not freestyle representations as the term might suggest, but accurate renderings from life.

This cartoon is being drawn as part of a fresco demonstration process.

- I think there are different reasons for casting the subject you want.

For instance, having to do biblical scenes, you know it's hard to find a 2,000-year-old looking character when you don't really know what they look like.

I think then more it's a feeling of what the idea is supposed to portray and then you're trying to find something that keeps it human and you're trying to capture that.

[light orchestral music] - [Narrator] When the sketch is complete, a tracing is made.

- In the old days, they didn't care that much about the drawing itself.

They would punch holes on the drawing.

But if you wanna save the drawing, you trace it.

- [Narrator] And then pinholes are punched along the trace lines, the first step in a process called pouncing.

The pouncing transfers the pigment to the lime's skin on the surface, a wall or a ceiling.

The lime itself has been carefully prepared and aged as long as a year before being applied in ever thinner layers, for our demonstration, to an old piece of Italian tile.

The wet plaster allows a day's worth of painting time, more or less, before the lime loses its ability to absorb the pigment.

So every minute counts.

[light orchestral music] [light orchestral music] The paints used in fresco are ground earth pigments mixed with pure water.

- [Ben] I try to keep the colors pretty simple and they are basically the earth colors of old.

- [Narrator] Each color is prepared in a single batch, specifically for the fresco, a word which means fresh in Italian, so that the color applied today will match that applied tomorrow.

But nobody said it would be easy.

And mastering fresco requires a lengthy learning curve, not to mention some frustration along the way.

- You can work all day long and then use the wrong color and it'll change everything.

And so there is a lot of hit and miss learning.

You have to screw up quite a few frescos and then you learn how to do it.

[light orchestral music] I think people are generally drawn to interesting characters.

Part of the whole reason of doing anything with art is that it has to do with life.

There's a human element in doing things from life you certainly can't get if somebody's already presented you with a fixed image.

[light orchestral music] You know when you think you've achieved what you're after, visually, you stop or you just get fed up with it.

[light orchestral music] - [Narrator] Sometimes fresco artists return to their creations later to touch things up.

The technique is called fresco-secco.

- In retouch, you never paint because what you're doing is using very transparent colors to the best you can marry one day with the other.

[light orchestral music] And it needs to stay transparent because the whole effect of fresco is the fact that you want the colors to be influenced by the lime in which the initial true fresco colors are embedded.

[light orchestral music] The only reason you do any kind of retouch is to harmonize the whole painting.

- [Narrator] Long painted his first North Carolina fresco during the summer of 1974 at St. Mary's of the Hills Episcopal Church in West Jefferson.

[light orchestral music] - [Ben] When I first started studying with the man I studied with, his name is Annigoni, almost one of the very first days we went out to this church where he was to do a fresco.

And when you walk in and you see this huge wall, big empty wall, and you get to cover it with figures and paintings and color and the imagination just as is unleashed on something like that.

And it's very exciting and it does have an effect on the people who come into that particular room.

Wonderful pictures change and stimulate the attitude of just about anybody who walks in and sees them.

So it's a very effective art form.

- [Narrator] Back in Morganton, the muses continue their beguiling dance across the ceiling, as a cast of characters, friends of the artist observe from the sidelines, including Long's Italian mentor and teacher waving in the background, plus the artist himself sitting on the steps and appearing a bit tired.

When the rest of the world learns about Ben Long's North Carolina frescos, people from just about everywhere are certain to find their way to this unassuming Performing Art Center in the Blue Ridge Foothills, where they too will become mesmerized by Morganton's muses and the art of true fresco.

[light orchestral music] [light music] - Thank you for joining us for "Best of Our State."

We have enjoyed sharing North Carolina stories with you.

See you next time.

[light music] [light music] [light music] - Thanks for catching our show.

We'll see you later.

Somewhere on down the Waterway.

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