Harry Hampton and the Forest Nobody Was Supposed to Save

The old-growth bottomland hardwood forest along the Congaree River in South Carolina survived into the twentieth century because it was too wet and too remote to log efficiently, not because anyone was protecting it. By the nineteen sixties, that calculation had changed. Improved equipment made previously inaccessible bottomlands profitable, and several hundred thousand acres of old-growth floodplain forest across the Southeast had already been cleared.

Harry Hampton was the editor of the Columbia State newspaper and a passionate outdoorsman who had spent decades in the Congaree Swamp hunting and fishing. When logging proposals for the area began to advance in the late nineteen sixties, Hampton started writing. He wrote about the trees, some of the largest examples of their species in the eastern United States, loblolly pines one hundred and sixty feet tall, champion-sized water hickory and swamp chestnut oak. He wrote about the flood cycles that had built the soil over millennia, depositing sediment from across the Piedmont plateau. He wrote about what would be lost and who would bear the loss.

His campaign, sustained over years in the editorial pages of a regional newspaper, helped generate enough public pressure to push the Nixon administration toward protection. The Congaree Swamp was designated a National Monument in nineteen seventy-six. Congress upgraded it to a National Park in two thousand three, more than two decades after Hampton died in nineteen eighty.

Hampton never held federal office. He never lobbied Congress personally. He was a newspaper editor in a mid-sized southern city writing about a swamp most of his readers had never visited. The trees are still there.