Americans love to rank things — including national parks.
Whether you’re scrolling social media or blog posts, chances are you’ve encountered a list of all sixty-three national parks, placed in the order of someone’s personal preference. The obvious parks are always at the top: Yosemite, Zion, Olympic, Grand Canyon, and the like.
Americans are biased towards bold vistas, usually relegating the more subtle landscapes in the park system towards the bottom. Eastern, urban parks such as Cuyahoga Valley and Indiana Dunes tend to swirl the drain alongside the least impressive of all national parks, Gateway Arch in Missouri.
Located just south of Columbia, South Carolina’s Congaree National Park often finds itself ranked at the bottom. While it might not have the dramatic granite of Acadia or rolling Blue Ridge of Shenandoah, Congaree is a pristine natural resource in its own right, undeserving of its low ranking. Visitors to Congaree have the opportunity to see a diversity of wildlife, record-setting trees, and the last remnant of what was once an incredibly common ecosystem — all of which is revealed by an understanding of the park’s history.
Logging the Congaree Swamp
Around the turn of the 20th century, 15,000 acres of hardwood on South Carolina’s Congaree River were purchased for bottom-dollar by Francis Biedler. Biedler, a Chicago timber developer, believed he’d found a lucrative opportunity to profit off logging the hardwoods growing in the Congaree floodplain. Massive bald cypress in other species thrived in the swamplike conditions. Many are so large that today they have the title of “champion trees,” a recognition that they are the largest of their species known.
These massive trees represented good money — so why was Biedler able to acquire them at a cheap price? As he soon discovered, felling the trees and transporting them to market was too expensive and inefficient to be profitable. Though he could have offloaded the acreage to some other hopeful businessman, Biedler instead chose to set it aside as a private forest reserve. In doing so, he unknowingly laid the foundation for a future unit in the national park system.
Preserving the Congaree Swamp
The landscape Francis Biedler purchased by the Congaree is described as hardwood bottomland. It’s an ecosystem that used to be common throughout the southern United States stretching from Texas to Virginia. By the 1950s, it had all but disappeared as a result of timber men like Francis Biedler — whose 15,000 acre tract had become the largest unbroken remnant left.
The Biedler tract drew the attention of Harry Hampton, a South Carolina newspaperman and conservationist who leased part of the Biedler property for hunting. Understanding its significance as an ecological remnant, he began advocating for protecting the swampland in the 1950s. In 1963, the National Park System completed a resource study that recommended it as a national monument.
In 1969, the price of hardwood leaped upward, prompting a renewed effort to fell and sell the massive Congaree hardwoods. This new imminent threat kicked off a concerted park-making campaign that built off Harry Hampton’s previous efforts. In 1976, Congress passed legislation to purchase the Biedler tract and use it to create Congaree Swamp National Monument. It was upgraded to national park status in 2003.
The overlooked resources of Congaree National Park
Congaree National Park doesn’t have sandstone arches or humpback whales, but that doesn’t mean it belongs at the bottom of the national park rankings. An understanding of its history helps reveal the special place it holds in the national park system. More than just a swamp, it’s a place unlike any other left in the United States of America.
In that reality, it reminds us of the mission of the National Park Service — to preserve the broad range of natural resources that can be found in this country for all future generations.
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