Congaree National Park Adds 2,395 Acres
By Joey Holleman, The State, Columbia, S.C.
Nov. 20–Like its massive trees, Congaree National Park is growing.
A 2,395-acre addition to the park, purchased last week, adds a critical link in a potential protected corridor on the Congaree, Wateree and Santee rivers.
The Trust for Public Land bought the Bates Fork tract for $5.5 million and immediately sold it to the National Park Service.
“This is a truly remarkable piece of property — both for its natural beauty and ecological significance,” said Chrisanne Mitchell, who handled the transaction for the trust.
The nonprofit private land conservation organization often buys such properties and then sells them to the Park Service.
The addition boosts the size of the Congaree National Park to about 24,600 acres and puts the park on the border of the Santee Swamp. The Wateree and Congaree rivers merge and flow into the Santee Swamp and then Lake Marion.
The Bates Fork tract runs along the Congaree River from U.S. 601 south to the Wateree River. The property is separated from the main park area by two other tracts approved for inclusion in the park. The National Park Service hopes to buy those tracts when money is available.
The Santee Swamp, classified by its owner Santee Cooper as a natural area, covers 18,000 acres. With the 25,000-acre Manchester State Forest overlooking the Wateree just upstream, wildlife soon could be wandering a nearly unbroken, non-developed corridor on more than 30 miles of rivers.
The Bates Fork tract, owned for a century by the Francis Beidler family, forms one bank of Bates Old River, a four-mile-long oxbow lake. This thin crescent of water was part of the Congaree River generations ago before being cut off when the river shifted. It teems with wildlife and is ideal for canoeing or fishing.
“The American people have received a magnificent area, rich in both natural and cultural resources,” said Steve Clark, interim superintendent of Congaree National Park.
The new addition also includes Sampson Island, a broad, sandy ridge that historians believe was used by Native Americans as a gathering spot.
In 1976, the Beidler family sold the original 15,138 acres of what was then designated as Congaree Swamp National Monument. Conservationists clamored for that deal to protect one of the few remaining large tracts of old-growth, river-bottom forest in the country.
When the National Park Service redesignated the area as South Carolina’s first national park in 2003, it approved the expansion of the park by nearly 4,600 acres. In 2004, Congress appropriated $6 million to buy more land for the park. Buying the Bates Fork tract took most of that money.
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