Okefenokee

Why should it be a National Park?

The Okefenokee is the largest blackwater swamp in North America, four hundred thousand acres of peat bog sitting in a shallow basin behind an ancient sand dune called Trail Ridge. The water is the color of strong tea, stained by tannins from decaying vegetation, and it is so still that the cypress and the sky reflect in it perfectly. The name comes from a Hitchiti word usually translated as trembling earth, because the peat floats, and islands in this swamp shift underfoot.

Two rivers begin here. The Suwannee runs southwest to the Gulf, the St. Marys east to the Atlantic. In between are prairies of water lilies, cypress domes, and sandy islands where people farmed until the 1930s. Something like twelve thousand alligators live in the swamp. Sandhill cranes nest here, along with more than two hundred other bird species, and the night sky above it is among the darkest east of the Mississippi.

It was nearly destroyed twice. The Suwannee Canal Company tried to drain the whole thing in the 1890s and went bankrupt; the ditch it left is still called the Suwannee Canal, and locals called the effort Jackson's Folly. Then loggers took most of the old-growth cypress between 1909 and 1927. Roosevelt made it a wildlife refuge in 1937, and Congress designated most of it wilderness in 1974.

In 1929 Congress directed a study of an Okefenokee National Park. The refuge came instead, and no park bill has been filed since. The recent fight has been about something else entirely: a titanium mining company wanted to dig on Trail Ridge, the sand dune that holds the swamp's water in place. Nearly two hundred thousand people filed comments against it. In June 2025 the Conservation Fund bought the mine site and its mineral rights for close to sixty million dollars, ending the threat. A year later UNESCO inscribed the swamp as a World Heritage Site. The Okefenokee has world standing, a global designation, and still no National Park.