southeast Virginia, showing Lake Drummond and Union Camp holding ponds to west (at Franklin)
Source: NASA - Stennis Space Center
Lake Drummond is one of two natural lakes in Virginia. In both cases, the formation and continued existence of the lakes is mysterious.
Over 200 million years of steady erosion in Virginia has allowed streams to etch their way into every valley. The stream channels have drained whatever lakes may have formed long ago in the last major orogeny, when the Appalachian Mountains were lifted up and topography transformed. In the most recent Ice Ages, no new lakes in Virginia were scoured out by the ice sheets - in contrast to places such as Minnesota, where melting glaciers transformed the landscape and created lakes (including the Great Lakes) in the last 18,000 years.
It appears that no lakes in Virginia have survived the millenia of erosion, but two appear to have been created by recent events. Mountain Lake (in Giles County) may have formed as Salt Pond Mountain eroded down to an unusual structure in the Clinch Sandstone formation. There, cracks in the sandstone have formed a depression (and intermittently allowed Mountain Lake to drain). Lake Drummond may have been burned into the peat of the Dismal Swamp by a fire, or may have been punched out of the peat by a meteorite impact.
Geologically, Lake Drummond is an unusually large open body of water in a region with little relief. The lake has a natural rim that makes it a high point in the swamp. Ditches, some dug during the time when Virginia was a colony (including "Washington Ditch," initiated by George Washington's, are supplied naturally with water that drains by gravity out of the lake.
There's no obvious reason for one big lake to be there in the middle of the swamp. Perhaps Lake Drummond was formed when a natural fire burned a "hole" in the peat that covers the surface of the area. Another possible cause is a meteorite strike, perhaps similar to those thought to have peppered the surface of eastern North Carolina and created numerous elliptical "bays" or small lakes.
Today, Lake Drummond is in the middle of the Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The Union Camp Corporation, a lumber company, donated the logged-over swampland to The Nature Conservancy in 1973, and then the conservancy transferred the property to the Federal government. One goal of the US Fish and Wildlife Service is to restore the natural flow of water in the swamp, undoing the effects of ditches and logging roads that have created dryer-than-natural and wetter-than-natural areas. Major forest fires, perhaps influenced by the altered drainag, have altered the ecosystem as well.
Lake Drummond is named for a former North Carolina governor who chose the wrong side in Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. The last words of Governor Berkeley of Virginia to William Drummond were "Mr. Drummond, you are very welcome. I am more glad to see you than any man in Virginia. Mr. Drummond, you shall be hanged in half an hour."1
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