Chapter 7 “Redwoods of the East”

The Visitor Center at Congaree National Park rightly honors Harry R. E. Hampton (1897–1980) as the “driving force” behind the first efforts to preserve the Congaree bottomlands as a nature reserve (see fig. 7.1). As a member of the Cedar Creek Hunt Club and associate editor for The State newspaper in Columbia for over forty years, Hampton wrote eloquently about the natural wonders of the “Swamp” and made the first calls for its preservation in his Woods and Waters column, which was published between 1930 and 1964. Born in 1897, Hampton was the great-nephew of Governor Wade Hampton (1877–1879) and grew up in an affluent family that split time between Columbia and Charleston.¹⁶ A passionate sportsman who had hunted, fished, and hiked the bottomlands for decades, Hampton Page 178 →used his column and other writings to present an intimate portrait of a unique landscape that his readers had never visited, describing in lyrical prose its “cathedral-vaulted oaks” as a place where “a dogged God breaks trail to me.”¹⁷

Hampton parlayed his position at The State to gain conservation support from his colleague Peter Manigault at the Charleston Post and Courier, who also began to publicize the natural wonders of the Swamp and the need for its protection.¹⁸ Fearing that logging would one day return to the Congaree, Hampton and Manigault teamed up by contacting government officials who might support their call to set aside the Beidler Tract as protected public land.¹⁹ Recalling his early years of advocacy on behalf of Congaree, Hampton noted that “[t]he area had not been a ‘working forest’ for more than half a century, and now and then someone would ‘wave checks’ at the Beidlers seeking to buy the timber, according to the scuttlebutt.”²⁰ Already in 1954, Hampton contacted The Nature Conservancy describing the need for preservation, as well as Edward Bourke, the representative of the Beidler Trust in Chicago. Hampton soon learned that The Nature Conservancy lacked funding to help with Congaree protection; in time it Page 179 →would focus its attention instead on helping the Audubon Society acquire Beidler land in the Four Holes Swamp near Orangeburg.²¹ Bourke, meanwhile, rebuffed Hampton outright, arguing that the Beidler family had been cheated of a fair price for the 60,000 acres the government had acquired in the 1930s for the New Deal Santee-Cooper Power and Navigation project, which resulted in Lakes Marion and Moultrie.²² Bourke contended that the submergence of valuable timberlands left the Beidlers with a bad feeling toward “any of Uncle Sam’s land-managing agencies, the National Park Service included.”²³

At the height of the preservation campaign in the 1970s, journalists who interviewed Hampton about his early advocacy on behalf of Congaree encountered a man as “tall, stately and dignified as the trees in the Swamp,” who spoke in a “quiet drawl heavily laced with accentuations” and who attributed his successes largely to “bullheadedness.”²⁴ National media delighted in images of “Old Harry” wiping mud off of his boots dressed in camouflage, evoking romantic images of this moss-draped Southern wilderness for readers beyond the Midlands.²⁵ Yet such imagery belied Hampton’s political savvy and ignored the decades-long conservation efforts that preceded the Congaree campaign.²⁶ Early in his years at The State, Hampton used his Woods and Waters column to advocate for wildlife protection laws and lobby for the formation of the South Carolina Game and Fish Association. Established in 1931, this association advocated for requiring hunting and fishing licenses and establishing closed hunting seasons for numerous species; it later became the South Carolina Wildlife Federation. Hampton served as its president in the 1950s, hounding the legislature to pass stricter game and fish laws and to form a State Wildlife Department.²⁷ Hampton called on every “right-thinking individual within our borders,” whether hunter or not, to support the measures, noting that the “preservation of our wildlife is important to every man, woman, and child in this state.”²⁸

The association members valued the Congaree Swamp and other bottomlands for their lack of development, natural beauty, and unparalleled access to game species for sport hunting.²⁹ As historian John Reiger has aptly noted, “gunners and anglers” such as Hampton “looked upon themselves as members of a fraternity with a well-defined code of conduct” toward the nonhuman world (see fig. 7.2).³⁰ They were also among the first to document precipitous declines in animal populations due to overdevelopment and toxification of their habitats. Hampton’s experience shows that recreational sportsmen—not lone transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau—were the “real spearhead of conservation” in the Deep South.³¹

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Page 181 →Yet, by the 1950s, Hampton turned increasingly toward scientists, not his fellow anglers and hunters, to create an advocacy coalition with pull at the national level.³² Hampton brought naturalists to Congaree who hoped that this vast tract of relatively undisturbed hardwood forest might harbor nesting sites for the iconic Ivory-billed Woodpecker, which at that time stood on the brink of extinction.³³ Among them was James Tanner, a zoologist from the University of Tennessee, who was among the last to band and study the fabled woodpecker while working at Louisiana’s 81,000-acre Singer Tract before that land tragically fell to the buzzsaw. Hampton invited other key figures to view the area’s natural wonders: Richard Pough, first president of The Nature Conservancy; John Dennis, a Maryland botanist who conducted the first systematic vegetative and ornithological surveys of the swamp; and William Robertson, the park biologist for Everglades National Park.³⁴ Pough, whom Hampton characterized as “probably the best ecologist in the country,” was astounded by the landscape he encountered at the Congaree.³⁵ He later reverently described his encounter: “Here at last I have found trees that matched the descriptions of early botanists and naturalists.”³⁶ Congaree soon drew botanists and wildlife biologists from the University of South Carolina (USC) and Clemson University alongside “garden clubs, bird clubs … [and] … writers and photographers from other states,” all of whom marveled at the unparalleled natural diversity and geological significance.³⁷

Hampton’s gradual shift from a sportsman’s valuation of the swamp to a naturalist’s view of it as an ecological relic embodied a broader emphasis in mid-century American environmental politics that prioritized nature’s intrinsic value over its sustained use. This bifurcation in the conservation movement, which can be traced to John Muir’s failed early-1900s effort to stop the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, lies beyond the scope of this essay, but Hampton himself was clearly aware of shifts—and had mixed feelings about how preservation might curtail his own wanderings.³⁸ Hampton faced backlash from hunter friends and colleagues who valued their cherished stalking grounds for providing both supplemental protein and what Reiger calls sportsmen’s “repositories of fond memories and keen anticipations.”³⁹ “Someone called my brother,” Hampton recalled in 1975, telling him he should be “ashamed of me for trying to tie up the swamp which, possibly, was providing for them and others with livelihood and income from self-helped fish, game and hogs.”⁴⁰ Many hunters felt that their recreational practices enhanced wildlife diversity and resented the “outsiders” who spoke on behalf of swamps. Such tensions Page 182 →signaled the growing rift between Hampton’s earlier game management perspective and the ecological concerns that animated preservationists.

Given the lukewarm reception of both The Nature Conservancy and the Beidler family toward his proposals for a nature reserve, Hampton likely recognized that scientific appeals to ecology and preservation would garner more sustained and broad-based attention than the hunting traditions of his youth. Ecology offered a way of overcoming many of the negative connotations of “Swamp,” which associated such landscapes with disease, snakes, and psychological terror. “Many people have the impression that a swamp is gloomy and treacherous, a place to be avoided,” Dennis noted, and recounted a story told by Hampton about a “veteran woodsman” who got lost in the swamp for several days and “became so deranged by the experience that he ran in the opposite direction when approached by rescuers.”⁴¹ Yet both the Everglades in Florida and the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia had achieved the status of federally protected areas, largely by emphasizing the amazing biodiversity of their watery landscapes.⁴²

Indeed, Congaree’s foreboding swamp was a welcoming shelter for relic animals and plants, including a number of ancient trees, among them a 250-year-old loblolly pine. Dennis also hoped to find a specimen of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker for which he had searched decades in vain.⁴³

The transformation of swamps from landscapes of terror into vulnerable ecological relics reflected a series of four emerging priorities within national environmentalism and federal conservation policy in the 1960s.⁴⁴ The first was a new wave of wilderness advocacy that culminated in the 1964 Wilderness Act. As environmental historians such as Roderick Nash and Alfred Runte have noted, wilderness advocates had long drawn inspiration from nineteenth-century romanticism and transcendentalism in their call for protecting “pristine” landscapes. This call had become more urgent around 1900 as the perceived “closing of the frontier” led many conservationists to call for national parks that might provide respite from an increasingly urbanized and industrial society as well as reinvigorate nationalist values and masculine character.⁴⁵ National park advocates had also worried about the extinction of the buffalo, a concern that eventually led to the creation in 1956 of Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota as a park devoted to protecting this iconic mammal’s habitat. Congaree nature lovers shared this concern for protecting endangered species, noting that both the rare Mississippi kite and Swainson’s warbler inhabited Page 183 →the swamplands.⁴⁶ But they also played up the exotic and masculine qualities of the Congaree wild lands, noting that the region was full of “giant rattan vines that would make Tarzan drool.”⁴⁷

A second motivation of wilderness advocates reflected unease about post–World War II industrialization, suburbanization, extractive industries, pollution, and overpopulation, particularly in the wake of Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book Silent Spring.⁴⁸ Wilderness areas took on another layer of significance as laboratories for testing out how to coexist with the nonhuman world and redesign urban and agricultural systems according to the cybernetic principles of energy flow, homeostasis, and self-equilibration that were in vogue in the ecological sciences at the time.⁴⁹ As the environmental movement grew, notes Samuel P. Hays, “a host of natural systems became objects of environmental action: lakes and free flowing rivers, southern swamps, prairies in the western mid-west, areas of unique plants and animals.”⁵⁰ Charles Wharton, a specialist in swamp ecology from Georgia State University, portrayed this terrain as an ecological baseline for broader land-use planning: “Let’s look at the Congaree not so much … as a prospective memorial to the southern swamps now nearly vanished, but rather as a laboratory for the future welfare of the common man.”⁵¹

These scientists represented a third trend in postwar environmentalism: a growing reliance on expert rather than recreational knowledge in setting conservation priorities. Scientists were instrumental in bringing Congaree’s wonders to the attention of the NPS. American Museum of Natural History director Pough was among the conservation leaders who advocated for Congaree protection. In a 1959 letter to the NPS director, Conrad Wirth, Pough “put in a word for the preservation of a sample of the wonderful hardwood forest,” hinting that the Francis Beidler Charitable Trust of Chicago might be “vulnerable” to an appeal from the National Park Service.⁵² Hampton no doubt delighted in Pough’s ability to pull strings at the national level to advocate for his beloved Congaree. In 1959, in fact, representatives from the Southeastern Office of the National Park Service agreed to conduct a suitability study of the swamp for possible designation as a national monument, thereby supplementing Pough’s ongoing investigation of the scenic, scientific, historical, and recreational values of the area with federal support.⁵³ Emboldened by the possibilities of monument designation, Hampton and Pough cofounded the Beidler Forest Preservation Association in 1961, whose goal was to “preserve the Beidler tract in perpetuity.”⁵⁴ The Congaree was the “number one preservation goal east of the redwoods,” Pough exclaimed, a wonderland of champion-sized trees, Page 184 →rare birds and insects, and moss-draped vegetation that would allow future visitors to overcome their misconceived stereotypes of bottomlands as snake- and mosquito-infested wastelands.⁵⁵ Scientists interested in rare and endangered species “ecologized” bogs, marshes, and swamps, transforming former “wastelands” into vestige habitats worthy of public attention.⁵⁶

The increasingly ecological orientation of the national environmental movement coincided with the fourth and final trend: changes at the NPS that signaled an agency-wide shift from tourism development to scientific resource stewardship.⁵⁷ As the environmental historian Richard Sellars has noted, since its founding in 1916, the NPS had functioned more as a tourism and development agency than a wilderness protection organization, building lodges, erecting concession stands, and cutting new roadways to scenic overlooks across the country, all in an effort to accommodate America’s increasingly motorized population.⁵⁸ This effort to expand automobile access had always made some environmentalists uncomfortable. Indeed, the wilderness movement, with its focus on identifying auto-free zones and protecting them from human manipulation alongside shielding primitive recreation areas, stemmed from the perceived imbalance between visitation and nature protection. Howard Zahniser, an officer of the Wilderness Society and key proponent of the Wilderness Act, advocated for the zoning of parks between the “front country” and wilderness backcountry, as well as placing a premium on roadless areas as places of special public resort and ecological regeneration.⁵⁹ The NPS “Organic” [establishing] Act’s original charge to protect cherished spaces “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations” gained some traction over ever-expanding public use and motorized enjoyment.⁶⁰

Emboldened by the successful effort to stop the damming of Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument in Utah in 1956, Zahniser and others pushed Congress to pass the Wilderness Act in 1964.⁶¹ The act set a new standard for how wilderness areas on public lands should be designated and treated, underscoring that such terrains should be “untrammeled,” “natural,” “undeveloped,” and possess “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”⁶² The text of the Wilderness Act does not deny the historical presence of humans on the land—indeed, it explicitly recognizes that wilderness may contain “other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.”⁶³ Yet Congress still directed federal agencies to manage such landscapes passively to allow natural processes the dominant role, furthering tensions between natural and cultural resource management.⁶⁴

Page 185 →Though the Wilderness Act called for “passive” management within wilderness, some NPS advocates moved toward hands-on “purposeful management” to restore and sustain other parklands as wild animal habitats. In what one historian has called the “Leopold Era,” Aldo Starker Leopold—son of famed Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold—published a landmark 1963 assessment of park management policies that pushed the agency to use ecological principles to intervene, where necessary, to assist “biotic communities” in making their way through “natural stages of succession.”⁶⁵ Leopold recognized that most of the world’s national parks would never be self-regulating ecosystems: they were fallowing islands in an expanding sea of land development. For him, “purposeful management” of habitats meant implementing prescribed burns to restore savannas or even culling “excess” grazing ungulates to sustain grasslands.⁶⁶ Unlike Zahniser, Leopold also enumerated myriad historical activities that had impacted parklands or even destroyed entire species and topographies, including “logging, burning, livestock grazing, hunting and predator control.” No park could escape history, yet Leopold insisted it was possible to cultivate a “reasonable illusion of primitive America” that evoked the sensory world that “prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man.” In his view, park managers should be ready to hide or remove unsightly historical features, such as shacks and dams, “ration” tourists, and proscribe further roadbuilding.⁶⁷ The Leopold Report made it possible to think of a future Congaree preserve as the nucleus for wider renaturing efforts.⁶⁸

Though Congaree would not be designated a “wilderness” park until 1988, the challenges of balancing ecology, primitiveness, and tourism were already quite evident in the 1963 Specific Area Report: Proposed Congaree Swamp National Monument that called for federal recognition. William Robertson, who headed the team from the Southeast Regional Office that wrote the Specific Area Report, concurred with Pough’s “sense of urgency” about acquiring Congaree Swamp as a potential national monument “for future generations” to enjoy.⁶⁹ Echoing the many biologists who had visited the region, Robertson stated, “Today the forest within the study area exists in a near virgin state. This magnificent forest of ‘specimen’ trees is a rare remnant of what was once typical of southern river bottom lands.”⁷⁰ The 1963 report enumerated significant aspects of the park that gave the region its “intrinsic” biological and geological value. These values included the unique river bottom hardwood forest associated with the “swamp-like” floodplain with varying topography and vegetation; the remarkable size of tree specimens (some of which reached 160 feet and measured 21 feet in Page 186 →circumference at breast height), and swamp ecology with relatively unspoiled fauna. According to the 1963 report, these features put the Congaree area “clearly in the scientific category,” rather than being a park defined by scenic vistas, expansive recreation, or historic resources.⁷¹

Visitor access remained a priority for Congaree, but not of the scale or scope often associated with the camping and hiking at the more well-known parks of the American West such as Yosemite or Yellowstone. Robertson and his team noted that the Congaree bottomlands were “at once remote and accessible: remote in atmosphere, yet easily reached within a day’s drive by over 1.5 million people, including the metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Charlotte, and Savannah as well as Columbia, all facilitated by the planned construction of Interstate 26.”⁷² Given the ecological fragility of the swamp and the periodic flooding, humidity, and mosquitoes, the 1963 report anticipated a park where most visitors would experience the bottomlands in a boat rather than on foot. The authors foresaw allotting space to a Cedar Creek concessioner who might rent or operate shallow draft boats equipped with low-power electric motors for short trips into the creeks and sloughs, leaving the rest of the stream for otters and other wildlife.⁷³ The NPS team argued that limited fishing and boating would be wholly compatible with forest protection. Whether visitors would find the swamp “scenic,” the authors argued, would depend on the eye of the beholder. Beyond the river, Robertson noted, open vistas were lacking, but the dense forests offered “stirringly beautiful … [and] … tranquil dark views gained from a john-boat while floating silently down Cedar Creek.”⁷⁴ Beyond the ever-present threat of resumed logging, Robertson and his team worried about Army Corps of Engineer proposals to widen the Congaree channel for shipping, which might destroy the hydrological mechanisms that kept the floodplain forest intact. They hoped monument status might delay or deflect such proposals until the federal government could document Congaree’s “nationally significant” features.⁷⁵

Robertson and his team considered the human context in which the Congaree floodplain exists, but they did not deem this cultural connection to be significant: this was to be a “natural” landmark. The 1963 report stated, “Principal fringe area developments are small farms, plantations, an occasional store and gas station, churches, and school houses. Some farm activity has become established along the banks of the Congaree River. However, the periodic flooding of the land limits the agricultural operations but permits considerable ranging of cattle and hogs.”⁷⁶ The report also referred to hunting clubs in the area, whose unimproved roads and small two-story houses, one assumes, could be easily removed once the area Page 187 →was designated a monument. The authors assumed that “tourist courts” and restaurants would set up shop in the immediate vicinity of the park but otherwise anticipated that the area would remain rural: “remote but accessible” to scientists and more distant, urban populations.⁷⁷

Echoing the Leopold Report’s emphasis on restoring a “first contact” sensory experience, the 1963 report omitted entirely the historical memories and recreation practices of Black residents who would become the monument’s neighbors. The NPS authors referred to the area’s residents as “tenant farmers and day laborers,” rather than the land-owning descendants of African American farmers, some of whom had purchased parcels from the Reconstruction-era Land Commission and established farmsteads across lower Richland county.⁷⁸ Many of these residents had long used the nearby Beidler Tract for fishing and hunting as well as staging baptisms and community events that enhanced spirituality and sociability.⁷⁹ Such nonexploitative practices, as historian Mart Stewart has observed, were legacies of a historical landscape in which enslaved people had experienced wetland environments as zones of limited freedom “outside the banks and in the interstices of the grid,” allowing for supplemental hunting and fishing, traveling to see family from other plantations, and even temporarily escaping the horrors of their bondage.⁸⁰ Such uses and memories fell outside the scope of the NPS report, which envisioned the ideal visitor to this “gem” as those seeking escape from “urban noise and confusion” and a “desire to get close to nature by guided and unguided walks.”⁸¹

Unlike other regions of the country, where scholars have shown that African American residents had often expressed a distaste for swamplands associated with slavery and Jim Crow-era lynchings, Congaree’s floodplain forests have elicited warm oral history memories among locals.⁸² The self-described “outdoors people” who appear in Janae Davis’s work enjoyed fishing, trapping, gathering, and boating on Beidler lands before the restrictions on motorized access put in place by the 1988 wilderness designation.⁸³ These residents’ vision of place saw unsettled land as an extension of the utilized, familial, and familiar landscape. Such vernacular uses reveal a deep and abiding affinity for naturalized landscapes that fell outside the scope of the traditional conservation-preservation binary and challenged the standards of “primitiveness” that undergirded the Specific Area Report. Such inattention to African American landscapes, foodways, and social networks ensured that local residents remained invisible, too, among the both the proponents and opponents of monument designation in the 1970s.⁸⁴

Page 188 →Despite these gaps, the Specific Area Report became the ecological baseline study that preservationists and government agencies cited to justify securing the Swamp as a national monument. In May 1963, the Department of the Interior sent copies of the report to the South Carolina legislative delegation in Washington, DC, and to Governor Donald Stuart Russell’s office. Soon thereafter, University of South Carolina botanist Wade Batson initiated a natural landmark theme study of the Beidler Tract, noting especially the number, variety, and size of the remnant loblollies.⁸⁵ The Beidler Forest Preservation Association also used the report’s recommendations to lobby federal and state officials, make presentations to conservation and sportsmen’s organizations, and submit newspaper editorials in favor of monument designation. With sponsorship from both the Charleston Museum and The Nature Conservancy, John Dennis continued uncovering ever-more champion trees and diverse populations of birds.⁸⁶ However, wider public awareness of the swamp’s natural value was limited and many of Hampton’s audiences raised strong objections to the land being taken out of private ownership.⁸⁷ In the meantime, The Nature Conservancy did negotiate where it could to protect wetlands, acquiring Four Holes Swamp—a “magnificent relic stand of virgin cypress” thirty-five miles northwest of Charleston—from the Beidlers in the late 1960s (see chapter 6, this volume).⁸⁸

The NPS state coordinator, Ben F. Moomaw consulted regularly with the Beidler Forest Preservation Association to monitor threats to the swamp, most especially logging and river channelization. All acknowledged the Beidlers’ continued hostility to a large-scale monument and federal intervention—indeed, the most that the family would agree to set aside was a 500-acre parcel, not the 22,000 recommended in the report. Moomaw was frustrated by the Forest Association’s failure to arouse public support, with many area residents believing that the proposed monument would weaken the state’s important wood products industry.⁸⁹ Hampton and Pough’s organization struggled on for six years before it disbanded due to lack of public support.⁹⁰ Pough seemed resigned to the situation: “I know the Beidlers all feel they got a very dirty deed from some agency of government when the land they owned in the Lake Marion basin was condemned and the timber destroyed.”⁹¹ The preservation movement needed a broader base of support to convince the federal government to follow through on the 1963 recommendations.⁹²

This stalemated situation remained in effect until a group of naturalists exploring the swamp discovered a clear-cut tract of about 500 acres in 1970. All hardwoods on the site, as well as the beautiful cypress, had Page 189 →vanished. Preservationists soon learned that a timber company had cut the trees in 1969 and that the Beidlers had quietly been leasing timber rights on the 15,000-acre core tract since 1967 to generate income for the family trust beneficiaries.⁹³ Between 1969 and 1975, in fact, sixteen contracts were issued to Georgia-Pacific and Council Brothers, among others, to harvest almost 3,000 acres.⁹⁴ Preservationists began to see a pattern of block-by-block cutting—a slow loss that would prevent protesters from a massive sit-in or demonstration.⁹⁵ Such a protracted rate of cutting was considerably less destructive than timber operations in other Southern bottomlands in this period—a reflection of the Beidler family’s commitment to sustained-yields.⁹⁶ Nonetheless, from the family’s perspective, Congaree’s big hardwoods, such as ash and sweetgum, were already “overmature” as the timber would soon be past its prime for furniture and other wood products. “Locking up” the trees in a national preserve, they argued, would violate those conservation principles that advocated for the efficient use and replanting of timberlands.⁹⁷

The Beidlers assured the public they would leave the “champion trees” on their lands intact. But ecologists argued that such isolated remnants could never recompose the “synergistic complexity” of the climax forest they treasured. One preservationist compared it to receiving a “fine heirloom” and then discovering that the “settings with the stones” had been removed.⁹⁸ The discovery of the clearcuts on the Beidler tract unleashed a growing anxiety that without sustained political pressure, the bottomland forests might disappear in a piecemeal fashion. Many of the scientists and explorers of the swamp in the 1960s were young, and they infused their outrage at renewed logging with both scientific insights and the culture of grassroots activism common in that era.⁹⁹ To save the Congaree Swamp, they knew that lobbying politicians and government administrators was not enough: they were in a battle to “educate the public” before it was too late.¹⁰⁰

On December 9, 1974, at the height of the effort to save the Congaree, Sierra Club member Ann T. Snyder wrote a letter to the editor at The State, noting that “[t]hose who know the Congaree Swamp know we have a forest that rivals the redwoods.” Except for the removal of cypress sixty years before, Snyder noted, this tract of land was “virgin.” Time was running out for the Redwoods of the East, however, as logging was underway in the Beidler Tract. Instead of record trees, she lamented, South Carolinians would soon Page 190 →be faced with “record stumps” without immediate action.¹⁰¹ Numerous parallels existed between the majestic cypress trees and the giants of coastal California, not the least of which was their shared economic value. “The Congaree is a beautiful forest. And its beauty is matched to a great extent by its worth as timber,” noted Sierra Club leader Edgar Wayburn. “As John Muir once said about the redwoods, ‘As timber it’s too good to live.’”¹⁰²

By connecting their effort to Muir and the Redwoods, Congaree preservationists highlighted the parallels between their local battle and one of America’s most iconic environmental crusades. The leaders of the local battle included three naturalists: John Cely, a graduate student in biology at Clemson University; Richard Watkins, a chemical engineer from the town of Camden; and, James Elder, a biology teacher at Dreher High School in Columbia.¹⁰³ In 1972, the trio founded the Congaree Swamp National Preserve Association (CSNPA), an ad hoc group of preservation supporters closely allied with the South Carolina Environmental Coalition (SCEC), a local chapter of the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Society.¹⁰⁴ The CSNPA sprang into action at a challenging time. The Beidlers appeared unwilling to sell their lands and calls to reduce federal spending in Washington, DC, had created a decidedly “anti-park” attitude in the Nixon and Ford administrations.¹⁰⁵

To shore up support for Congaree’s magnificent eastern Redwoods, the CSNPA launched a public awareness campaign that included dozens of news and magazine articles, 40,000 brochures, and hundreds of letters to political leaders.¹⁰⁶ It organized tours for novices to the wonders of the swamp and even led a delegation to Chicago to bring the group’s concerns directly to the Beidler family.¹⁰⁷ The Association also renewed local ties with the NPS, organizing a two-day outing to the swamp in February 1974 that included NPS director Ronald H. Walker and State Representative Alex Sanders.¹⁰⁸ In honor of the occasion, the Bachman Group of the Sierra Club presented the NPS with a proposal for a 70,000-acre “national preserve” encompassing the Congaree, Wateree, and Upper Santee bottomland systems, underscoring the new appreciation for the “beauty, solitude, and untamed wildness of swamps” among the “general populace.”¹⁰⁹

Young Democrats and other student groups at USC also enthusiastically supported the CSNPA effort. “With such a potential source of natural, long-lasting beauty,” noted Don Laney III, president of the Young Democrats, “how can one even start to think of letting the Congaree Swamp further deteriorate because of man-made monstrosity?”¹¹⁰ Both the CSNPA and the SCEC knew that the youth were vital to the environmental cause and worked with college students to let their peers know about the Congaree’s Page 191 →champion trees. A group of USC geology students circulated petitions drawn up by SCEC calling for the swamp preserve and requesting that their fellow students write to their congressmen to protect the tract, particularly Congressman Floyd Spence, whose Second Congressional District encompassed the proposed national monument’s terrain. As geology graduate assistant Phil Astwood put it, “This is a virgin forest that is the same way now as it was when the Indians were here. It is the only climax forest in the Southeast and for that reason it should be preserved.”¹¹¹ USC students thus connected their love of a primitive hiking ground with a growing understanding of ecology to press the preservationist cause.

National media soon followed. In 1974, NBC featured both the Congaree and Santee swamps in their Wild Spaces special, lending public attention to the plight of bottomland forests.¹¹² A 1975 article in The New York Times referred to the Congaree as a place where “the 700-year-old cypress lives next to the pine as tall as a 15-story office building and the oak as thick as the column on a bank.” Despite such natural treasures, the author noted, one could detect “from somewhere … . the buzz of a chain saw,” bent on destroying the “forest of champions.”¹¹³ The portrayal of the two wetlands in tandem was no accident. By 1971, the South Carolina State Public Service Authority had proposed new logging in the Upper Santee Swamp, near the headwaters of Lake Marion. This bottomland, also located on former Beidler land, was popular for its abundant fish, waterfowl, and small game. The South Carolina Audubon Society had helped to curtail timber harvests at Santee but the wetlands remained vulnerable.¹¹⁴ To ensure that both areas were protected for a broad-based coalition of outdoor enthusiasts, the CSNPA endorsed the Bachman Group’s proposal for a multipurpose preserve much larger than the NPS national monument proposal—almost 70,000 acres, modeled on the recently designated Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas.¹¹⁵ As Jim Elder noted, the preserve concept offered a more flexible notion of preservation attuned to recreational needs, one that would allow hunting in select zones while keeping the core Beidler tract intact.¹¹⁶

Despite growing public support, when South Carolina governor, James B. Edwards visited the Swamp in 1975, his entourage consisted largely of forest products industry members—a sign that Edwards’s sympathies lay with the state’s largest industry, whose leaders remained hostile to the proposed preserve.¹¹⁷ In response, the SCEC held a Congaree Action Now! rally on September 20, 1975, that attracted prominent environmentalists as speakers, including Brock Evans, the Sierra Club’s national director, and Gary Soucie, former executive director of Friends of the Earth, who had written Page 192 →an influential piece in Audubon on behalf of the coalition’s cause (see fig. 7.3).¹¹⁸ Many USC students attended the rally. “Since Monday, a table has been sitting outside of Russell House displaying a bright orange poster with the phrase ‘Preserve Congaree Swamp,’” noted one Daily Gamecock article.¹¹⁹ Students were an essential part of the broad coalition needed to push NPS and Congress to protect a treasured local swampland.

More than 700 people—almost double the number that organizers had expected—attended the rally; the SCEC was able to collect over 10,000 signatures from citizens as far away as New Hampshire and Iowa.¹²⁰ Local environmentalists also garnered support from important national associations, including the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, and Friends of the Earth, which bolstered the SCEC’s reputation and put pressure on local legislators to support its initiatives.¹²¹ Congressman Floyd Spence, who was originally “a little pokey getting on the Congaree bandwagon,” suddenly found himself inundated with visitors who made “pests of themselves” to get him to introduce protectionist legislation.¹²² Spence noted that no other issue—not even the Nixon impeachment proceedings—had produced more mail. Senator Fritz Hollings commented on the support as well: 15 to 1 in favor of the “swamp.”¹²³ Surprised by the groundswell of popular endorsement, Governor Edwards agreed to appoint a fact-finding committee to assess the economic and environmental significance of the Congaree Preserve proposal.¹²⁴

Page 193 →Yet even in the wake of the rally, Congressman Spence was not yet sure he would introduce legislation calling for the estimated $30 million to protect the Congaree lands. “There are so many other pressing demands for money,” Spence told The New York Times. “I’m waiting for some studies of the swamp that various state and federal agencies are making. I favor preserving something, but the issue is how much. I just can’t decide whether to put in a bill until everybody has been heard.”¹²⁵ Governor Edwards offered lukewarm support for the proposition, noting that he would only support proposals to secure a portion of the 21,000-acre area if property owners were willing to sell the land and received a fair price. “I just cry,” commented Brion Blackwelder, the head of the SCEC. The public had been waiting since 1963 for a preserve, he noted. “We had a mass rally in Columbia a few weeks back that was attended by 700 people, but still the destruction goes on.”¹²⁶

Preservationists encountered stiff opposition from timber interests, the furniture industry, the hunting lobby, fiscal conservatives, and local landowners. These opponents warned that Congaree protection would be a job killer that cost the state millions in revenues, all for a bunch of college-educated “do-gooders” who wanted to watch birds or commune with mother earth.¹²⁷ Professional foresters and representatives of the timber industry in the Society of American Foresters (SAF) and the South Carolina Forestry Association (SCFA) led the opposition’s anti-preservation public awareness campaigns and political appeals. SCFA members bemoaned the prospect of “1,200 people” losing their jobs and plummeting property tax revenues if the Congaree forests were taken out of the timber market.¹²⁸ Robert Scott, SCFA’s executive director, lamented that the South had already lost too much of its timberland to recreation and urban development to meet the country’s needs heading into year 2000, when the demand for forest products was expected to double. “We’re not against nature and conservation, but we draw the line at condemnation and government seizure when it is not related to national interest, such as a highway route or airport site.”¹²⁹ Like many forestry industry representatives of the time, Scott equated “conservation” with the wise use of a renewable resource—not the “intangible benefits” of a forest held solely in “inviolate preserves.”¹³⁰

Following the wise-use philosophy, timber interests argued that the state could have its forests and harvest them, too—with measured extraction yielding economic and ecological sustainability.¹³¹ The SCFA distributed a brochure in 1975 warning that the national preserve would “only be used by a small number of citizens as a scientific laboratory with limited Page 194 →access and use by the general public for whom it was intended.” William H. Davis McGregor, chair of the College of Forest and Recreation Resources at Clemson University, argued for leaving the swamp under multiple-use management. McGregor ridiculed the notion that it “be set aside just to be looked at and admired by the relatively few individuals who can afford the time or money.”¹³² Through such publications, the forestry industry portrayed preservationists as elitists who disregarded the public interest. Preservationists countered that the SCFA ignored the potential tourism benefits for the Midlands. According to preservationist Robert Janiskee, the Santee Swamp received nearly 70,000 visitors in 1973, while Okeefenokee in Georgia drew 350,000 in 1974—a clear sign that “swamps” provided significant opportunities for recreation and aesthetic enjoyment. The creation of the national monument, he added, would spur employment in construction, hotels, restaurants, and other services. He also described the Swamp as a “vast natural laboratory” for USC and high school students—an educational asset worth far more than the Beidler parcel’s current “50 cents per acre in school-supporting tax revenues.”¹³³

The SCFA also allied with the Beidler family and neighboring landowners in opposing the new park. By 1974, the Beidlers had already hired a lobbyist to oppose any Congressional bills to create a Congaree national park or preserve and their statements to the press emphasized the family’s long-term stewardship over the timberlands that they believed would be ruined by federal control.¹³⁴ “We are harvesting over-mature trees on a selective basis which would be lost if not saved,” noted the Beidler Trust’s representative Edward Bourke in a letter to Richard Pough. “This is according to our long-term harvesting program for hardwoods on our Congaree lands … to prevent South Carolina hardwood mills and employment from closing.”¹³⁵ In a 1975 article in Audubon magazine, Francis Beidler II told Gary Soucie that the Congaree Swamp had escaped large-scale clear cutting because his father had instilled in him a sense of responsibility for this “national asset.” Beidler II described his father as a lifelong conservationist who, like Gifford Pinchot, has studied sustainable, uneven-aged management in Europe.¹³⁶ This scheme involved demarcating and cutting only high-quality trees (at least 40 inches in diameter at breast height) in sixty-year cycles—a rotation made possible by the vast number of acres held by the Beidler family.¹³⁷ For Beidler, the flooding of their former Santee Swamp lands in the 1930s was a moral outrage. The rotting cypress at the bottom of Lake Marion, he exclaimed, “violated the very premise of the forest-conservation philosophy.”¹³⁸ The Beidlers supported a 500-acre reserve and promised to preserve the record trees and to set Page 195 →aside “a small portion of the over-mature trees for scientific study and public use,” but remained emphatic that their land stewardship was superior to any federal agency.¹³⁹

Echoing Francis Beidler II’s insistence that multiple-use, private forestry yielded better conservation results than federally protected preserves, the SCFA put out a brochure in 1975 that told a history of sustained-yield lumbering in parts of the Congaree Swamp. The brochure stated that “parts of the 70,000-acre tract have been harvested, replanted, or regenerated naturally, and harvested again for at least 150 years.”¹⁴⁰ As Almlie has shown, the SCFA used images from historic maps and property plats to show a long history of human use, including “dikes, wagon trails, agricultural fields, and fences,” to cast doubt on the wild character of the proposed national park lands. The organization informed South Carolina legislators that very little “virgin” territory was left in the swamp; the rest had been logged, again and again. Indeed, Congaree’s forests only appeared “natural” due to foresters’ careful replanting.¹⁴¹ Such histories of benign, sustainable use—real or imagined—presented a cultural and political challenge to discourses of ecological integrity and purity and forced the CSNPA to shift rhetorical gears as the sound of chainsaws drew nearer.¹⁴²

While Governor Edwards and Congressman Spence dragged their feet on the issue, state representative William Campbell took the lead on the Congaree Preserve proposal. In July 1975, Campbell introduced a South Carolina General Assembly resolution to protect a 21,000-acre tract—a move that prompted a series of public hearings in which opponents almost succeeded in killing the measure. Many state senators opposed the resolution as well. Thomas O. Bowden of Sumter lambasted the “bird watchers and snake hole watchers” who favored safeguarding a “mosquito-infested” swamp that provided 32,000 jobs in his community.¹⁴³ In February 1976, the South Carolina House passed an amended version of the resolution that was sent to each federal representative, a move that put pressure on the state’s national representatives to shepherd a protectionist bill through Congress.¹⁴⁴

The legislative hearings drew CSNPA supporters into a heated historical debate with local landowners who attributed the Congaree’s “near-virgin” appearance to centuries of private care, which they argued had created a blossoming cultural landscape that a federally protected area would destroy.¹⁴⁵ In October 1975, the South Carolina House’s Agriculture and Natural Page 196 →Resources Committee held a packed hearing about the Congaree proposal that revealed starkly different landscape ideals. Brion Blackwelder, Jim Elder, and former state representative, Alex Sanders, pushed legislators to focus on the Specific Area Report’s assessment of Congaree’s ecological significance.¹⁴⁶ As Sanders noted passionately, “This may be your one opportunity to do something that will be remembered 100 years from now.”¹⁴⁷ Nonetheless, local landowners vociferously opposed the legislation, with many claiming provenance back to the days of colonial South Carolina.¹⁴⁸ This cohort characterized the preservationists as day trippers who lacked the deep connection to working lands that came with ownership—even though few provided concrete documentation of their families’ holdings or the extent or impact of previous harvesting activities.¹⁴⁹ Such opponents claimed that their families had owned land in the swamp since revolutionary days and did not need federal oversight to harvest timber sustainably.

In response to testimonies that cast doubt on Congaree’s wilderness character, preservationists expanded their own rhetorical toolkit to encompass cultural heritage, historical significance, and attachments to place, framing the big trees and swamplands as botanical witnesses to a patriotic story of European exploration, frontier expansion, and independence.¹⁵⁰ To be sure, preservationists had long known about the many historical uses of the Beidler tract. Richard Pough, for example, was puzzled by the extent, size, and persistence of shade-intolerant loblollies in the Congaree bottomlands. “Some people questioned whether the swamp was virgin forest,” Hampton noted, “since loblolly pine has to start on a fairly open site” and should have died off in favor of hardwoods under normal processes of succession.¹⁵¹ Dennis had theorized that they had established themselves after a non-anthropogenic breach in the canopy, perhaps from a big hurricane or due to dry conditions that allowed lightning-induced fires to spread across the forest floor.¹⁵²

The loblollies piqued Dennis’s curiosity about the human history of the area, however. In a 1972 article, he surveyed the many historical uses of the swamp in his discussion of forest ecology, including the construction of Native American mounds, the planters’ use of enslaved labor to build dikes for rice and indigo fields, and the remnants of “mounts” that sheltered cattle escaping rising waters as well as bootleggers seeking as safe spot for their stills.¹⁵³ Yet most proponents saw these features as ephemeral and transient, not worthy of serious documentation or analysis, largely because efforts to “settle” the swamp had failed. The Erskine College botanist Ross T. Clark testified that the swamp “shows only extremely localized evidence of disturbance”—nothing that threatened the health and integrity Page 197 →of the overall ecosystem.¹⁵⁴ On a more practical level, and in line with the more historically attuned Eastern Wilderness Act of 1975, preservationists characterized Congaree as a “fine old heirloom” and marveled at the forest’s ability to regenerate itself if its core ecosystem remained intact.¹⁵⁵

John Cely, a founding member of the CSNPA, took on opponents’ arguments about the previous human use directly, acknowledging that Congaree was not pristine in a conventional sense. Using old surveyors’ maps, Cely showed that agriculture during the antebellum period was confined to the river’s edge since, “Planters were reluctant to reclaim the swamps because it involved investing a considerable number of expensive slaves working in a disease-ridden environment to construct the elaborate system of dikes required to protect the crops from periodic floods.”¹⁵⁶ He then dug into dendrochronological data, archival land plats, traveler descriptions, and logging records to show that lands in the proposed reserve had never been extensively cultivated right up to the point where Beidlers consolidated the 15,000-acre tract in 1910. By 1915, when operations stopped, the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company had indeed removed most of the original cypress, he asserted, but the rest of the hardwoods on the tract remained intact and ecologically healthy—over 80 percent of the tract was thus “pristine” in his estimation. Cely’s analysis offered ample justification for including the Beidler tract as the nucleus for rewilding under the Eastern Wilderness Act.¹⁵⁷

As Congressional deliberations moved into 1976, preservationists expanded their notion of heritage even further to argue for the Congaree’s significance to the bicentennial story of frontier settlement and wars of independence. In this rendering, Congaree’s ancient trees became sentinels to critical events that anchored the story of American character in ancient landscapes.¹⁵⁸ That story began with the first European explorers, such as Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo, whose many encounters with Native Americans set the stage for trade and conquest in the centuries that followed.¹⁵⁹ After the 1975 rally in Columbia, Brock Evans told The New York Times that “cutting down the trees in the Congaree would be like cutting down the Liberty Bell, melting it down and selling the metal for spoons and forks.”¹⁶⁰ These and similar arguments augmented the natural character of the Swamp, especially in comparison to the “urban crisis” afflicting American cities at the time.¹⁶¹

Proponents also hyped the Swamp as the setting of Revolutionary War skirmishes that the “Swamp Fox,” General Francis Marion, had used to outmaneuver the British—even though there was not much concrete evidence of such tactics inside the proposed park lands. Still, the stories Page 198 →heightened the park’s colonial heritage at a time when public interest in patriotic stories from the Revolutionary War-era were at their height. As Gary Soucie put it, “while the Congaree was not a major battleground, at least it can remind us of the Swamp Fox and the southern Sons of Liberty.”¹⁶² Locals also drew on this imagery of American frontier settlement to advocate for the Swamp’s significance, with Snyder calling it “the forest the Spaniards met in their conquests West, the forest our pioneer fore-fathers cleared and settled, the forest in which the Swamp Fox eluded the British.”¹⁶³ Dennis became so excited about Swamp’s historical potential he suggested a new name for the Preserve: The John Lawson National Historical Park was one, Congaree National Historical Park, the other.¹⁶⁴

Galvanized by such arguments, South Carolina’s political leaders moved closer to preservationist legislation. Governor Edwards called on Congress to provide the $20 million necessary to purchase the 15,000-acre Beidler Tract—a strong about-face from his earlier reticence about the proposed monument.¹⁶⁵ But the Swamp’s fate “ultimately was in the hands” of Congressman Spence and Senators Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings, who had to move the legislation through Congress.¹⁶⁶ In May 1976, Spence and Senator Thurmond drafted separate bills, with the purchase of the land to come from the Land and Water Conservation Fund and estimated to be at $31.1 million (over $165 million in 2023 dollars).¹⁶⁷ Once Spence had joined the Congaree “bandwagon,” noted local reporter Jan Stucker, he “worked like a Trojan for his bill—testifying eloquently for it … and moving it along the House calendar.”¹⁶⁸ Congress passed the act establishing Congaree Swamp National Monument on September 21, 1976, just a year after the CSNPA rally. On October 18, President Gerald Ford signed the bill creating Congaree Swamp National Monument and providing the framework guiding its management.¹⁶⁹ NPS negotiations with the Beidlers over sale of the tract soon failed, however, prompting the Park Service, at the request of the Beidlers, to file a “declaration of taking” that passed the title to the federal government in February 1980.¹⁷⁰

Newspapers congratulated Spence, Hollings, and especially Thurmond, who had used his political heft to get the bill onto the floor for a vote. Stucker lauded Thurmond for his hard-nosed tactics—which included rounding up colleagues “from various haunts throughout the Capitol” to assemble the necessary quorum for moving the bill out of committee. Thurmond, “whose reputation for zeal concerning pet causes is well known,” she added, “outdid himself on Congaree.”¹⁷¹ Environmentalists also had much to celebrate, as the campaign had shown the power of local coalitions to mobilize public opinion, “joust with the forestry industry,” and keep legislators feet to Page 199 →the fire.¹⁷² As Stucker put it so well, there was no “nicer way for South Carolina to celebrate its Bicentennial than with Congaree Swamp National Monument.”¹⁷³

The campaign to save the Congaree Swamp from the timber industry had many characteristics of a “classic” preservation battle of 1970s environmental activism: a long history of previous recreational use by hunters, birders, canoers, and naturalists who had become patrons of the landscape in the early decades of the twentieth century; the threat of losing champion trees thought to harbor one of the twentieth century’s most iconic endangered species; a coalition of local and national advocates buttressed by youthful activists interested in protecting the Southeast’s last “virgin timber;” and the growing influence of ecology and ecological functions over aesthetic or even recreational use as the prime motivation for preservation. Yet the crusade retained its local and regional flavor, as preservationists understood that this was a Southern wilderness with a long history of human uses and memories. For opponents of the monument, who included both representatives of the timber and wood products industries and nearby landowners, such historical landscape traces served to de-legitimize a preservationist campaign focused on “virgin” landscapes and “untrammeled” spaces.

Proponents of the monument, meanwhile, tended to relativize the extent and impact of previous human “disturbances,” noting that the Beidler Tract was as “near virgin” as one could find in the Southeast. As they confronted those who challenged the monument’s designation, preservationists embraced bicentennial historical memories for their own purposes. The giant cypress trees of Congaree, they claimed, had sheltered some of the first European explorers in North America and witnessed key revolutionary maneuvers that were part of the wars of independence. Indeed, many preservationists equated the idea of a multiple-use “preserve” with a recognition of the landscape’s historical significance. They envisioned different zones for hunting, recreation, conservation, and preservation as the best way of reconciling competing interests, uses, and memories in this landscape. This forgotten “middle ground” of the 1970s shows that the Congaree Action Now! Campaign had a pragmatic and accommodationist side that looked beyond a one-size-fits-all Yosemite model. Neither preservationists nor their opponents, however, considered those who had resided in the Congaree bottomlands in the greatest numbers and over Page 200 →the longest time since the onset of European colonization: the African American residents of lower Richland County. These residents became the monument’s—and later national park’s—neighbors, yet none of the groups involved in the debate over the national monument solicited their voices or mobilized their political energies. The “storied wilderness” of Congaree remains incomplete without their deep knowledge of the bottomland forest and their visions of the park’s future.

1. 1. See Act to Authorize the Establishment of the Congaree Swamp National Preserve in the State of South Carolina, and for Other Purposes, US House of Representatives, 94th Congress, Public Law 94–545, October 18, 1976.
2. 2. Mark Kinzer, Nature’s Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 3; John Culler, “Forest of Champions: Through the Efforts of Three Naturalists, South Carolinians Are Learning Just How Valuable the Threatened Forest of Congaree Swamp Really Is,” South Carolina Wildlife Magazine (November 1974), reprinted in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest on the Continent (South Carolina Environmental Coalition, 1975), 53–58.
3. 3. See Act Authorizing the Establishment of the Congaree Swamp National Preserve in the State of South Carolina, and for Other Purposes, US House of Representatives, 94th Congress, Report 94–1570, September 16, 1976. According to the Act, Congaree had lost an estimated 500 acres annually since 1969. See p. 3.
4. 4. This essay builds on a rich existing history of the Congaree Swamp area, including, among others, Kinzer’s Nature’s Return. Several essays produced during the height of the 1970s campaign to save the trees from logging also offer a good overview, including John V. Dennis, “The Climax Forest of the Congaree Swamp,” 59–61 and John Cely, “Is the Beidler Tract Virgin?,” 91–94, in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest.
5. 5. Congaree Swamp National Monument Expansion and Wilderness Act, 100th Congress, Public Law 100–524 [S. 2018], October 24, 1988; An Act Making Appropriations for the Department of the Interior and Related Agencies, 108th Congress, Public Law 108–108 [H.R. 2691], November 10, 2003.
6. 6. Larry Gates, “The Nature Mysticism of John Muir,” in Sierra Club Online: John Muir Exhibit, available at https://vault.sierraclub.org/. Neal Polhemus has shown that the Congaree campaign coincided with the Sierra Club’s expansion from a West Coast-based organization to Atlantic Coast campaigns, with the Joseph LeConte chapter playing a critical role in Congaree protection: “50 Years since the Torch Was Passed: The Sierra Club and the Founding of Congaree National Park,” The Metropole, https://themetropole.blog/.
7. 7. Wayburn, “Parallels Between Redwood and Congaree Swamp Preservation,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 115; Robert H. Mohlenbrock, “Redwoods of the East: These are the Champions,” Natural History 129, no. 5 (May Page 201 →2021): 42. Mohlenbrock notes the botanist L. L. Gaddy identified “champion trees” among the Congaree loblollies, sweetgums, Carolina ash, and laurel oaks, among others.
8. 8. Elizabeth J. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape: Valuing Cultural Resources During the Establishment of Congaree National Park, South Carolina” (master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 2010), 19.
9. 9. Dennis, “The Climax Forest of the Congaree Swamp,” 60–61; Richard Pough, “Keep Your Region’s Ecological Spectrum Intact,” 97–98 in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest.
10. 10. Mart A. Stewart, “If John Muir Had Been an Agrarian: American Environmental History West and South,” Environment and History, 11, no. 2 (May 2005): 139–62. Local preservationists were aware of these historical traces at Congaree. See Robert Janiskee, “A Congaree Primer: Perspectives on the Battle of ‘Redwoods East,’” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 71–84.
11. 11. American Bird Conservancy, “Ivory-billed Woodpecker,” online resource available at ABC’s “Bird Library” at: https://abcbirds.org. Conservationists still hold out hope that remnant breeding pairs still exist; see Jerome A. Jackson, “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis): Hope, and the Interface of Science, Conservation, and Politics,” The Auk 123, no. 1 (January 2006): 1–15.
12. 12. William B. Robertson, et al. Specific Area Report: Proposed Congaree Swamp National Monument, South Carolina (US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Southeast Region, April 1963), in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 8–10, 26; A. Starker Leopold, Wildlife Management in the National Parks (US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1969).
13. 13. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 3; Dennis, “The Climax Forest of the Congaree Swamp,” 59–60.
14. 14. See also Elizabeth J. Almlie, “A Place of Nature and Culture: The Founding of Congaree National Park, South Carolina,” Federal History Online, Issue 3 (2011), available at: http://www.shfg.org/. On the troubles with wilderness interpretation, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 69–90; Matt Lockhart, “‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ Education in the National Park Service: The Case of the Lost Cattle Mounts of Congaree,” The Public Historian 28, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 11–30.
15. 15. The CSNPA originally called for a large-scale “national preserve,” much like the Big Cypress in Florida and Big Thicket in Texas, both designated in 1974. On the differences between these designations, see NPS, “What’s in a Name? Discover National Park System Designations,” available at: https://www.nps.gov/.
16. 16. Harriot Faucette, “Legacy for a Daughter,” Columbia (SC) Record, December 24, 1980; see also the short history at the website for the Harry Hampton Wildlife Fund: http://www.hamptonwildlifefund.org/.
17. 17. Harry Hampton, “Lone Camper,” in Random Rhymes and Odes in Imitation of the Immortals (self-published, 1979), 8; Fran Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History” (US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Congaree Swamp National Monument, March 1991), 9–11.
18. 18. Page 202 →John V. Dennis, “Woody Plants of the Congaree Forest Swamp, SC,” The Nature Conservancy Ecological Studies Leaflet No. 12, July 1967, reprinted in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 39.
19. 19. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 22.
20. 20. Harry Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I, 1953–1967,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 134.
21. 21. Gary Soucie, “Congaree: Great Trees or Coffee Tables?” Audubon 77, no. 4 (1975), in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 64–65.
22. 22. Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I, 1953–1967,” 133; Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 9.
23. 23. Soucie, “Congaree: Great Trees or Coffee Tables?,” 64.
24. 24. Nancy Coleman, “He Speaks for the Wilderness,” South Carolina Wildlife Magazine (1976), in Harry Hampton Collection, Congaree National Park Archives, 15; see also the descriptions of Hampton in Bob Campbell and Sally Hopkins, “Congaree Swamp: A Sense of Urgency,” South Carolina Wildlife Magazine (July–August 1973), reprinted in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 50.
25. 25. Coleman, “He Speaks for the Wilderness,” 15.
26. 26. I owe these insights to undergraduate essays from my HIST 498 senior seminars on “Local Environmental History” and “Environmental History and the Community,” which focused on Hampton’s media savvy.
27. 27. See also the short history in the Harry Hampton Wildlife Fund, available at: http://www.hamptonwildlifefund.org/.
28. 28. Harry Hampton, “Woods and Waters,” The State (Columbia, SC), June 5, 1931.
29. 29. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 22.
30. 30. John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origin of Conservation (Winchester Press, 1975), 22.
31. 31. Reiger, American Sportsmen, 21.
32. 32. Coleman, “He Speaks for the Wilderness,” 17; Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I,” 133–34.
33. 33. The search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker appears again and again in documents calling for Congaree protection. See, for example, Campbell and Hopkins, “A Sense of Urgency,” 49–50. Phillip Hoose’s gripping The Race to Save the Lord God Bird (Square Fish, 2016) offers a good account of the bird’s mythical importance to conservationism. Congaree’s bottomlands would become a cornerstone of recovery effort should the species ever be de-listed as extinct. See US Fish and Wildlife Service, Recovery Plan for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis; USFWS Southeast Region, Atlanta, GA, April 2010), especially 1–17.
34. 34. Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I,” 133–35 and James Tanner, “Ecological Comparisons: Congaree and other Bottomlands,” in Congaree: The Greatest Unprotected Forest, 105–7; Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 2.
35. 35. Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I,” 134.
36. 36. Pough, quoted in South Carolina Wildlife, John Culler, ed., March–April 1975, from a letter in the Readers Forum, 8. Cited in Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 3. Pough’s obituary also underscores his Page 203 →advocacy for Congaree. See Stuart Lavietes, “Richard Pough, 99, Founder of The Nature Conservancy,” New York Times, June 27, 2003, C11.
37. 37. Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I,” 133–35.
38. 38. On Hetch Hetchy, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 5th ed. (Yale University Press, 2014), 161–81; Robert Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2008). On Hampton’s feelings about the move toward preservationist views, see Coleman, “He Speaks for the Wilderness,” 15.
39. 39. Reiger, American Sportsmen, 36.
40. 40. Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I, 1953–1967,” 134.
41. 41. John V. Dennis, “Big Trees of the Congaree Swamp,” National Parks and Conservation Magazine (October 1972), in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 44.
42. 42. On this point, see Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 19–20; Megan Kate Nelson, Trembling Earth: The Cultural History of Okefenokee Swamp (University of Georgia Press, 2005).
43. 43. Dennis, “Big Trees of the Congaree Swamp,” 41.
44. 44. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 19. On the shifting management philosophies of the 1960s, see Ronald A. Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers (Taylor and Francis, 2011), 93–111.
45. 45. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, esp. ch. 8–10; Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience 4th ed. (Taylor Trade Publishers, 2010).
46. 46. Dennis, “Big Trees of the Congaree Swamp,” 41.
47. 47. Culler, “Forest of Champions,” 56.
48. 48. Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (University of Washington Press, 2002).
49. 49. Of particular interest here is the impact of Howard Odum of the University of Georgia on systems thinking in Southeastern contexts. See Gary Barrett and Terry Lynn Barrett, Holistic Science: The Evolution of the Georgia Institute of Ecology (1940–2000) (Taylor and Francis, 2001). In “Redwoods of the East,” Mohlenbrock notes that the older ecological ideas of large and stable “plant communities” have been replaced with the concept of smaller and more loosely interconnected “alliances.”
50. 50. Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 135. Emphasis added. Cited in Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 19.
51. 51. Charles Wharton, “The Congaree: An Ecological Perspective for the Taxpayer,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 110. Wharton’s combination of ecology and economy anticipated an “ecosystem services” approach to assigning value to protected areas.
52. 52. Pough to Wirth, letter, July 3, 1959, cited in Rametta, 4.
53. 53. Dennis, “Climax Forest of the Congaree,” 42 and Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I, 1953–1967,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 134; Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 3–5.
54. 54. Coleman, “He Speaks for the Wilderness,” 17; Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 10.
55. 55. Page 204 →John Dennis, “Big Trees of the Congaree Swamp,” 42; Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 21–22.
56. 56. C. Schmidt, “On Economization and Ecologization as Civilizing Processes,” Environmental Values 2, no. 1 (1993): 33–46.
57. 57. Jason Aldridge, “Congaree National Park: An Evolving Approach to Managing Nature and History in the National Park Service” (master’s thesis, University of Georgia, 2014), 10–14; Foresta, America’s National Parks and Their Keepers, 59–92.
58. 58. Richard W. Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (Yale University Press, 1997), 3.
59. 59. Sutter, Driven Wild, 19–99.
60. 60. Aldridge, “Congaree Swamp,” 51–52.
61. 61. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 202–4.
62. 62. The Wilderness Act of 1964, 16 U.S.C. § 1131–1136 (1964).
63. 63. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 2; Wilderness Act of 1964, 16 U.S.C. § 1131–1136 (1964).
64. 64. Lockhart, “‘The Trouble with Wilderness’”; William Cronon, “The Riddle of the Apostle Islands,” Orion (May–June 2003), 36–42. In most cases, the Wilderness Act overrides the NHPA, although court cases have shown a tendency toward context-dependent management when the two statues clash. See Nikki C. Carsley, “When Old Becomes New: Reconciling the Demands of the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act,” Washington Law Review 88, no. 2 (2013): 525–58.
65. 65. Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 204, cited in Aldridge, 47.
66. 66. A. Starker Leopold, Wildlife Management in the National Parks: The Leopold Report (US National Park Service, 1963), 1–4
67. 67. Leopold, Wildlife Management in the National Parks, 4–7.
68. 68. Aldridge, “Congaree Swamp,” 47–49.
69. 69. William B. Robertson, et al., Specific Area Report: Proposed Congaree Swamp National Monument, South Carolina (Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Southeast Region, April 1963), in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 8–10.
70. 70. Robertson, et al. Specific Area Report, 26.
71. 71. Robertson, et al., Specific Area Report, 10; On the report and its impact, see Aldridge, “Congaree Swamp,” 75–80.
72. 72. Robertson et al., Specific Area Report, 16.
73. 73. Robertson et al., Specific Area Report, 31.
74. 74. Robertson et al., Specific Area Report, 13.
75. 75. Robertson et al., Specific Area Report, 25.
76. 76. Robertson et al., Specific Area Report, 24.
77. 77. Robertson et al., Specific Area Report, 30.
78. 78. Elizabeth J. Almlie, et al., Prized Pieces of Land: The Impact of Reconstruction on African-American Land Ownership in Lower Richland County, SC (2009). University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Books and Manuscripts. Book 3. Available online at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/pubhist_books/3/.
79. 79. Janae Davis, “A Tale of Two Landscapes: Examining Alienation and Non-Visitation Among Local African American Fishers at Congaree National Park” (master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 2015).
80. 80. Page 205 →Mart A. Stewart, “Rice, Water, and Power: Landscapes of Domination and Resistance in the Lowcountry, 1790–1880,” Environmental History Review 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 47–64, here 52.
81. 81. Robertson et al., Specific Area Report, 26.
82. 82. On this topic, see Cassandra Y. Johnson and J. M. Bowker, “African-American Wildland Memories,” in Michael P. Nelson and J. Baird Callicott, The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great Wilderness Debate (University of Georgia Press, 2008), 325–50; Carolyn Finney, Black Faces: White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
83. 83. On local residents’ benign view of the Congaree bottomlands, see Davis, “A Tale of Two Landscapes,” 60–80 and her article “Black Faces, Black Spaces: Rethinking African American Underrepresentation in Wildland Spaces and Outdoor Recreation,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 2., no. 1 (2019): 89–109. On racial barriers to access, see also David Weaver and Laura J. Lawton, “Perceptions of a Nearby Exurban Protected Area in South Carolina, United States” Environmental Management 41, no. 3 (March 2008), 389–97 and Ye Le, Nancy C. Holmes, and Colleen Kulesza, Barriers to a Backyard National Park: Case Study of African American Communities in Columbia, SC (US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 2012).
84. 84. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” esp. the chapter “The Missing Voice of the Local African-American Community,” 51–55.
85. 85. Jim Elder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part III, 1972–Present,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 143; Dennis, “Big Trees of the Congaree,” 40.
86. 86. John V. Dennis, “Preliminary List of Birds of Congaree Swamp in South Carolina,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 119–31.
87. 87. Harry Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I,” 133–34.
88. 88. Soucie, “Great Trees or Coffee Tables,” 68; Brion Blackwelder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part II,” 137. On the Four Holes campaign, see also Archie Carr, “Black Water, Green Light,” Audubon 73, no. 6 (1971).
89. 89. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 12.
90. 90. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 10.
91. 91. Cited in Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 6–7.
92. 92. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 21–22.
93. 93. Elder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part III,” 141; Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 162–63.
94. 94. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 163; Kinzer, “Beidler Tract Timber Sales” (unpublished manuscript, 2013), 1–6.
95. 95. Brion Blackwelder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part II,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 137–38; B. Drummond Ayres, Jr., “Saws Invade the Forest of Champions,” New York Times, November 14, 1975.
96. 96. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 163.
97. 97. Soucie, “Congaree: Great Trees or Coffee Tables?,” 66–67; Janiskee, “A Congaree Primer,” 74–77.
98. 98. Janiskee, “A Congaree Primer,” 78.
99. 99. Page 206 → Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 4–5.
100. 100. Janiskee, “A Congaree Primer,” 77; Aldridge, “Congaree National Park,” 79–81.
101. 101. Ann T. Snyder, The State (Columbia, SC), letter to the editor, December 9, 1974.
102. 102. Wayburn, “Parallels Between Redwood and Congaree Swamp Preservation,” 115.
103. 103. Culler, “Forest of Champions,” 53–58.
104. 104. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 5; Polhemus. “50 Years Since the Torch was Passed.”
105. 105. Soucie, “Great Trees or Coffee Tables?,” 67.
106. 106. Elder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part III,” 142.
107. 107. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 5; Blackwelder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part II,” 138; Elder, “Efforts for Congaree, Part III,” 142.
108. 108. Soucie, “Great Trees or Coffee Tables?,” 65.
109. 109. Bachman Group of the Sierra Club, “An Introduction to the Swamp Systems of the Congaree, Wateree, and Santee Rivers in South Carolina,” (unpublished report, February 28, 1974).
110. 110. Daily Gamecock (Columbia, SC), letters to the editor, “Congaree Preserve Deserves Support,” January 13, 1975, 6.
111. 111. Marion Elliot, “Congaree Swamp Worries Students,” Daily Gamecock (Columbia, SC), April 7, 1975, 1, 3.
112. 112. Elder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part III,” 143.
113. 113. B. Drummond Ayres, Jr. “Saws Invade the Forest of Champions,” New York Times, November 14, 1975.
114. 114. Frank P. Nelson, ed., “Interim Report of the Taskforce under Authority of the Legislative Committee Created by Concurrent Resolution 217 (1971) to Evaluate the Harvesting of Timber in the Santee Swamp” (State of South Carolina Water Resources Commission, August 1975).
115. 115. Dennis, “Climax Forest,” 61. The original concept was a “national preserve” with a wilderness core surrounded by multiple-use landscapes that included a public hunting ground. On Big Thicket and the national preserve ideal, see Pete Gunter, The Big Thicket: A Challenge for Conservation (Viking, 1971) and James Cozine, Saving the Big Thicket: From Exploration to Preservation, 1685–2003 (University of North Texas Press, 2004).
116. 116. Elder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part III,” 142.
117. 117. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 27–28.
118. 118. Elder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part III,” 143; Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 5.
119. 119. Andy Thompson, “National Preserve Concept of Rally,” Daily Gamecock (Columbia, SC), September 11, 1975, 10.
120. 120. “700 Rally in Carolina Urge Swamp as a National Preserve,” New York Times, September 22, 1975.
121. 121. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 24–25.
122. 122. Jan Stucker, “S.C. Congressmen Realize Congaree Swamp Preservation,” Columbia (SC) Record, September 30, 1976.
123. 123. Elder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part III,” 142.
124. 124. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 29–30; L. L. Gaddy et al., “Vegetation Analysis of Preserve Alternatives Involving Page 207 →the Beidler Tract of the Congaree Swamp” (South Carolina Wildlife and Marine Resources Department, December 1975).
125. 125. Ayres, “Saws Invade the Forest of Champions,” New York Times, November 14, 1975.
126. 126. Ayres, “Saws Invade the Forest of Champions,” New York Times, November 14, 1975.
127. 127. Almlie, “Place of Nature and Culture,” 8. See also Clark Surratt, “Preservationists Blasted as Do-Gooders in Hearing,” The State (Columbia, SC), October 24, 1975; “Group Charges Congaree Swamp Facts Distorted,” The State (Columbia, SC), May 2, 1975.
128. 128. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 23–24.
129. 129. Ayres, “Saws Invade the Forest of Champions,” New York Times, November 14, 1975.
130. 130. Janiskee, “A Congaree Primer,” 75.
131. 131. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 46–47; Ayres, “Saws Invade the Forest of Champions,” New York Times, November 14, 1975.
132. 132. Both cited in Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 48.
133. 133. Janiskee, “A Congaree Primer,” 80.
134. 134. Elder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part III,” 143.
135. 135. Blackwelder, “Efforts for Congaree: Part II,” 137.
136. 136. Soucie, “Congaree: Great Trees or Coffee Tables?,” 67–68.
137. 137. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 162–63.
138. 138. Soucie, “Congaree: Great Trees or Coffee Tables,” 67.
139. 139. Cited in Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 24–25.
140. 140. Cited in Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 9
141. 141. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 9.
142. 142. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 29–50.
143. 143. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 35.
144. 144. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 33–36.
145. 145. On this topic, listen to Tanner Mann’s University of South Carolina Honors College podcast “Contested Congaree”: https://soundcloud.com/tanner-mann-605412800. Mann based his podcast on Congaree’s oral history collection, compiled by Dr. Jim Williams from 2010–2011.
146. 146. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 33.
147. 147. W. Clark Surratt, “Preservationists Blasted as Do-gooders in Hearing,” The State (Columbia, SC), October 24, 1975.
148. 148. Almlie, “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 42–50.
149. 149. W. Clark Surratt, “Preservationists Blasted as Do-gooders in Hearing,” The State (Columbia, SC), October 24, 1975.
150. 150. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 6–8.
151. 151. Hampton, “Efforts for Congaree: Part I,” 134.
152. 152. Dennis, “Big Trees of the Congaree Swamp,” 40–41 and “The Climax Forest,” 59–60.
153. 153. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 8; Dennis, “Big Trees of the Congaree Swamp,” 43–44.
154. 154. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 8; Ross Clark, “The Botanical Significance of the Beidler Tract of Congaree Swamp,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 101–3.
155. 155. Janiskee, “A Congaree Primer,” 77–80.
156. 156. Page 208 →Cely, “Is the Beidler Tract Virgin?,” 91–92. Cely has subsequently revised his original assessment using more recent historical data and ecological models of disturbance to distinguish the old, uneven stands from the true “old-growth” forests in the Beidler Tract. See “Is the Beidler Tract in Congaree Swamp Virgin? An Update 35 Years Later,” unpublished ms (2010). In a similar vein, Mark Kinzer has documented extensive human use of the Congaree bottomlands as “disturbance-mediated ecosystems” where regular non-human perturbations are normal and, indeed, necessary for the overall adaptive resilience of the system. See Nature’s Return, 182–93.
157. 157. Cely, “Is the Beidler Tract in Congaree Swamp Virgin,” 91–92.
158. 158. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 5–8.
159. 159. Dennis, “The Wildlife Beginning with John Lawson’s Travels in 1700,” and “A Postscript about a Name,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 85–89.
160. 160. “700 Rally in Carolina Urge Swamp as a National Preserve,” New York Times, September 22, 1975.
161. 161. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 7. On the contours of this crisis, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Class Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 2005).
162. 162. Hearings on H.R. 11891 and H.R. 12111, 216. Cited in Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 7.
163. 163. Cited in Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 7–8.
164. 164. Dennis, “The Wildlife Beginning with John Lawson’s Travels in 1700” and “A Postscript about a Name,” in Congaree Swamp: Greatest Unprotected Forest, 85–89.
165. 165. “Edwards Suggests Congress Help South Carolina Buy Swamp Tract,” The State (Columbia, SC), January 10, 1976.
166. 166. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 37. Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Parks and Recreation, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess. on S. 3497 and S. 3498, August 6, 1976 (US Government Printing Office, 1976).
167. 167. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 39–40.
168. 168. Stucker, “S.C. Congressmen Realize Congaree Swamp Preservation.”
169. 169. Rametta, “Congaree Swamp National Monument: An Administrative History,” 42.
170. 170. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 163–81.
171. 171. Stucker, “S.C. Congressmen Realize Congaree Swamp Preservation.”
172. 172. Almlie, “Place of Nature,” 5–6 and “Seeing History in a Wilderness Landscape,” 26–27.
173. 173. Stucker, “S.C. Congressmen Realize Congaree Swamp Preservation.”