The nation's newest: Congaree, SC 
Move over, Sequoia, the Old South has some pretty big trees of its own 

In the days before he portrayed bumbling Frank Drebin, the clueless detective in the Naked Gun series of movie comedies, Hollywood had groomed actor Leslie Nielsen as a B movie leading man. He’s the one who eventually got the blonde (Anne Francis) in Forbidden Planet, where he portrayed a handsome starship captain keeping his cool in the face of monstrous danger. 

Walt Disney liked Nielsen’s looks, too. In 1959 he cast Nielsen as the lead in a TV series called “Swamp Fox,” an action serial based verrrrrrry loosely on the exploits of Francis Marion, a Revolutionary War general who made life in South Carolina extremely difficult for the British. 

Marion, who lacked a large army or the resources to confront the British in direct battle, gathered about him a group of seasoned woodsmen and sharpshooters and turned them into a band of guerillas who would hide in central South Carolina’s swampy lowlands between sneak attacks on the Redcoats. Because Marion only struck when he had the advantage, melting into the woods when he was done, the British began calling him “the Swamp Fox.”  

Although the British never could quite bring themselves to respect what they considered the Americans’ unmanly attacks from hiding or the rear, they did appreciate Marion’s ability to inflict a great deal of damage on them despite their material superiority. His reputation as a canny guerilla leader became the stuff of regional, and later, national, legend. 

Surprisingly, despite the Civil War and the later industrialization of the South – events that put a mighty strain on the region’s ecology, parts of Marion’s woodland refuge remained intact. The lowland forest boasted immense hardwood trees, some of them the largest of their kind in the United States. There had been sporadic attempts to farm or log the forest, which was situated on an active floodplain. Huge bald cypresses, relatives of California’s giant redwoods, were especially attractive prizes for enterprising timber companies. 

But flooding – up to 10 times a year – made logging dicey, and the region’s high humidity made it almost impossible to let felled trees season and lose their moisture so that they could be floated down the Congaree River to a mill. By the 1960s, however, improved logging technology and the incentive of high prices for virgin hardwoods made harvesting the Congaree forest look attractive again.  

Fortunately, the Sierra Club led a drive to extend federal protection over the area, and President Ford established the Congaree Swamp National Monument in 1976. In 1983, the area was declared an International Biosphere Reserve. The final protective touch came last November when Congress created and President Bush signed into existence Congaree National Park, the nation’s 57^th. The 22,200-acre park (35 square miles) preserves the largest contiguous stretch of virgin hardwood forest left in the U.S.  

The prizes here aren’t just record-sized oaks, cypresses and loblolly pines. The new park is an officially designated wilderness that can be accessed only on foot or by canoe. The most popular hiking access is the park’s 2.5 mile boardwalk that meanders under one of the tallest tree canopies in the U.S. outside of the Pacific states’ coastal conifer forests. Park rangers says Congaree’s collection of record-sized big and tall trees is unmatched in the eastern U.S., and that it has the largest collection of different record-sized tree species of any U.S. national park, including Olympic National Park’s famed Hoh Valley forest. 

Summers are hot and humid. Winters are much milder, though there is always the threat of precipitation. But Congaree’s flat terrain, impressive canopy and virgin trees, as well as its relative closeness to most states of the Old South make it very attractive to travelers who want to experience a pristine place simply by lacing up a trusty pair of walking shoes or slipping into a boat. 

Googling or Yahooing “Congaree” or “Congaree record trees” will bring up an abundance of sites that will tell you more about the look and history of this newest national park.

– Patrick Totty