Congaree: The Redwoods of the East

Twenty miles south of Columbia, just outside the small town of Hopkins, the road drops into a different world. The trees get taller. The air gets heavier. The forest floor stays wet even in dry months because the Congaree River floods it regularly, depositing sediment, recycling nutrients, and keeping alive one of the most ecologically significant landscapes remaining in North America.

Congaree National Park preserves the largest intact tract of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the United States. Before European settlement, roughly fifteen million acres of bottomland hardwood forest covered the Southern states. By the middle of the twentieth century, less than one percent of that original forest remained. Congaree is the largest continuous piece of what survived.

The trees here are extraordinary in scale. The park holds more national champion-sized trees, the largest known specimens of their species, than any other place in North America. Loblolly pines rise more than one hundred and sixty feet. Swamp tupelos, bald cypresses, and laurel oaks reach dimensions that take several people to embrace. The naturalist Richard Pough, who helped found the Nature Conservancy, visited in the early nineteen sixties and called it "the redwoods of the east."

The man who first pushed for its protection was Harry Hampton, a Columbia journalist and outdoorsman who hunted in the Congaree floodplain and recognized what was there. He began advocating for permanent protection in nineteen fifty-four, formed the Beidler Forest Preservation Association in nineteen sixty-one, and spent years working to get federal recognition. Congress designated it Congaree Swamp National Monument in nineteen seventy-six. In two thousand and three, it was redesignated Congaree National Park, the swamp label finally dropped.

From mid-May through early June, the park hosts synchronous fireflies, one of roughly a dozen places on earth where this phenomenon occurs. Thousands of fireflies flash in coordinated pulses across the dark forest floor. It is an unusual thing to see.

The visitor center is named the Harry Hampton Visitors Center.