Georgia’s congressional delegation calls truce to collaborate on national attraction for state
ATLANTA – After more than a century of trying, Georgia may soon get its first national park, as the state’s congressional delegation puts aside partisan differences to upgrade the status of ancient mounds in Macon.
That city, long a champion of promoting Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park into a major national attraction, has already begun adding street names in the language of the native peoples who dwelled there.
The Muscogee Nation, whose ancestors were forcibly moved to Oklahoma by the U.S. government in 1836, has collaborated on national park status, and would have a role in guiding its management.
The park idea has induced similar collaboration in a normally fractured congressional delegation. Thirteen of Georgia’s 14 Republican and Democratic representatives are co-sponsoring legislation that would convert the historical park into the Ocmulgee Mounds National Park and Preserve. Georgia’s two Democratic U.S. senators are behind an identical bill in the Senate.
The current historical park would anchor the national park. Proponents would raise money to buy another 7,100 acres, expanding the attraction to about 10,000 acres. This addition would be a federally managed preserve with fishing and hunting.
That is downscaled significantly from the 80,000 acres once envisioned, but it would still have a major impact on the region, said Seth Clark, executive director of The Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative, the grassroots force behind this movement.
The preserve would guarantee a place for endangered and threatened species, said Clark, who, as mayor pro tempore of Macon-Bibb County, sees a massive boon for humans, too. Tourism would explode, boosting the economy, creating jobs and producing an estimated $34 million in added tax revenue for the region, he said.
“That’s life changing for some of our neighbors and I think it’s life changing for the Middle Georgia economy,” said Clark, who sees a unique alignment of interests that could finally push this national park idea across the finish line. It has been in circulation since at least 1933, when the Macon Historical Society and Junior Chamber of Commerce pitched it. The next year, the local congressman, Democratic Rep. Carl Vinson, introduced legislation for a national park. He wound up with the lesser national historical park designation, but the dream for top-tier status lived on. It may be closer than ever to happening due to the bipartisan collaboration as well as to support from state government, the public and businesses, including the Georgia Mining Association, Clark said. (Kaolin, a clay used to make slick paper coatings and other products, is mined around there.)
Supporters pulled these disparate interests together through years of study and negotiation. For instance, the mine owners came around after the legislation made it clear that the government could not use eminent domain to take land for the preserve, Clark said. The mandate to allow fishing and hunting proved popular, as well.
The United States has 63 national parks. The vast majority are out West, although three of Georgia’s neighbors can boast at least one. South Carolina has Congaree National Park, while North Carolina and Tennessee share the Great Smoky Mountains. Florida has three: Biscayne, Dry Tortugas and Everglades.
The National Park Service oversees another 370 battlefields, memorials, monuments, preserves, scenic rivers and other cultural and environmental sites, including the Ocmulgee mounds.
Dropping “historical” from the name could elevate Ocmulgee into a major attraction, observers say.
The park currently draws around 160,000 a year, said Jessica Walden, president and CEO of the Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce. National park status could increase that nearly ten-fold to almost 1.4 million annual visitors within a decade, she said.
This would generate several thousand jobs and about $233 million in annual economic activity, she said, noting that the proximity to Macon and its 160,000 residents would produce a synergy for both city and park.
“It’s not in the middle of Montana. It’s adjacent to downtown Macon,” she said. “So, they’re both going to benefit from that.”
Plans include new roads to tie the site to the city. Tourists also would need access to Macon’s two airports – and to the hotels and other destinations to be developed.
The site is like a core sample of cultural history. It was continuously inhabited for at least 12,000 years, beginning with the Ice Age, says the National Park Service. During the Mississippian Period, starting in the 900s, native peoples constructed mounds for their elite, landmarks that endure as a central attraction. It was the largest archaeological dig in American history, with more than 800 men turning soil in the late 1930s under the Works Progress Administration.
Then, there is the preserve. It would hug a river corridor with more than 85,000 acres of contiguous bottom-land hardwood swamp, says a 2017 study by the National Parks Conservation Association. The “Diamond in the Rough” report said this was the largest remaining block of such habitat on the upper coastal plain.
It is a migratory flyway, and home to more than 200 species of birds, 100 species of fish, 80 species of reptiles and amphibians and 50 species of mammals, including black bear.
It is also one of the few places where the endangered Ocmulgee skullcap grows. The member of the mint family sprouts leaves up to three inches long, unfurls inch-long blue-violet flowers and only lives in the watersheds of the Savannah and Ocmulgee rivers.
Business interests see the ecological, cultural – and development value.
“Establishing Georgia’s first national park and preserve at Ocmulgee Mounds will serve as a robust form of economic development for Middle Georgia while conserving the site’s important series of ecological and cultural assets,” said Chris Clark, president and CEO of the Georgia Chamber, the day after the state’s delegation to Congress re-introduced the national park legislation in March.
U.S. Rep. Austin Scott, R-Tifton, introduced his bill in the House of Representatives on March 25, the same day Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, with fellow Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock as co-sponsor, introduced an identical bill in the Senate.
All but one member of the U.S. House from Georgia signed onto Scott’s bill, the lone exception being Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Athens. (His office did not respond to an emailed query about that.)
Similar legislation had been in play last year, but more pressing concerns in Washington shoved the issue off the national agenda.
At a congressional hearing last week, Ossoff got an opportunity to ask Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for continued technical aid with the initiative, given the “overwhelming local support” for an Ocmulgee national park.
Burgum was noncommittal but did not outright nix the idea, saying he would be “happy to engage with you and take a look at this proposal.”
Scott’s office quoted the congressman saying that he was working closely with Democrats Ossoff and Warnock and with Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Albany, whose district also includes Macon. National park status “remains a top bipartisan initiative” for everyone involved, Scott said.
He said he requested a hearing on the legislation but added that he does not expect any movement on the bill before Congress finishes the budget reconciliation process.
Seth Clark, the Macon mayor pro tempore and local Ocmulgee cheerleader, remains hopeful.
“While this is probably one of the most volatile political times in my lifetime,” he said, “I believe that Congress has enough productivity in them to get this done.”