Ocmulgee Mounds

Why should it be a National Park?

On a bluff above the Ocmulgee River at the edge of Macon stand seven earthen mounds built about a thousand years ago by Mississippian people. The Great Temple Mound rises fifty-five feet. Beneath one of them is an earth lodge with its original clay floor intact, a circular council chamber with a raised platform shaped like a bird, where the people who lived here met to decide things. Visitors sit on that floor. It was packed by hand around the year 1000.

People have occupied this site for something like seventeen thousand years, one of the longest continuous records of human presence in North America. Paleo-Indian hunters camped here. Mississippian farmers built the mounds. The Muscogee people lived here until the removals of the 1820s and 1830s drove them to Oklahoma, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation has never stopped considering this its homeland. Today the Nation is a formal partner in the park, and the proposal to expand it was developed with them rather than around them.

The river corridor below the mounds is bottomland hardwood forest and swamp, the kind of country that survives because it floods. Black bear, alligator, and wood stork use it. Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge protects part of it already. A National Park Service study found the broader corridor nationally significant, and the proposed boundary would knit the mounds, the swamp, and the river into a single unit.

The bill would make this Georgia's first National Park, a National Park and preserve, with hunting continuing in the preserve portion. It has something almost no other park proposal in the country has: the entire state congressional delegation, both parties, and the tribal nation whose ancestors built the place, all pulling the same direction. It cleared a Senate committee in July 2026. If it passes, it will be the first National Park in America established in partnership with the people who were removed from it.