National Park status fulfills ’1934 dream that Macon people had’

After years of striving Macon has a national park, but there’s much work ahead to complete the job.

With President Donald Trump’s signature of a bill on March 12, Ocmulgee National Monument officially became Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park. The boundaries can now be expanded from 702 acres to 2,800 acres, however the bill included no money to buy the land.

That will have to come from a fundraising effort led by Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative. Brian Adams, president of the group, said hundreds of acres owned by The Archeological Conservancy are set to be turned over at no cost. He said it’s only a matter of taking care of the legal hurdles and that land should be part of the park within a few weeks.

Land owned by Bibb County and the Georgia Department of Transportation are also expected to be acquired easily. There are some smaller privately owned tracts, but the largest section left to acquire involves three landowners. Adams said that land will be purchased at fair market value, and the owners have expressed a willingness to sell.

He declined to put a timeline on how long it could take to acquire the land.

“As soon as possible is the goal,” he said. “We plan to get aggressive now. We don’t have a date set it has to get done by. We are just going to work as quickly as possible.”

He also wouldn’t put an estimate on how much money needs to be raised.

Jim David, the park’s superintendent for the past 22 years, postponed his retirement to see the national park designation get approved. He is now set to retire on May 31.

Amid cleaning out his office Tuesday, he took The Telegraph out to the current boundary of the park at Walnut Creek to talk about the effort to acquire the land on the other side.

He said most of the property to expand the park is woods and wetlands.

He noted that when the legislation passed to create the park in 1934, it also included language that no federal money would be used to buy the property. That legislation called for the park to be up to 2,000 acres, but it was in the middle of the Great Depression and locals were able to raise only enough to buy 678 acres.

David said he is optimistic that won’t be a problem this time.

“I see it in a lot of ways as fulfilling that 1934 dream that Macon people had,” David said. “I feel there is a very good chance they will raise the funds and buy the property.”

The significance of the expansion is that the land to be acquired was where most of the natives who built the mounds lived. Known to archeologists as the Mississippians, the group, estimated at over 2,000 people, built the mounds for the leaders of the tribe. The rest lived in the area to be acquired and grew crops of corn, squash and beans over miles of land, David said.

“The everyday worker, the people that were growing the crops and that kind of thing, lived down along the river,” David said. “Now we will be preserving the land that the everyday person lived on.”

The mounds were built about 1,000 years ago, David said, but there is evidence that the land had been occupied by humans as far back as the ice age.

There’s another element of the project that could ultimately mean expansion far beyond 2,800 acres. Congress approved a 3-year study that will look at the cultural and historical significance of land along the Ocmulgee River from Macon to Hawkinsville.

If that study has positive results, and David believes it will, it would ultimately mean expansion of the park along the river all the away to Hawkinsville. David said if that happens the park could ultimately grow to over 50,000 acres. That would be years away though and would take another act of Congress to approve the expansion.

Once the bill creating the park passed Congress, it was considered likely that Trump would sign it into law, but David wasn’t taking that for granted. He was elated when he heard that it had been signed.

“That meant a great deal to me,” David said. “Back in December when we thought it was going to pass in lame duck and it didn’t, I was very depressed. ... I really felt there was no way of it happening.”

A celebration for the park expansion is set for 5 p.m. Monday at the park and the public is invited. The chief of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, which occupied the land before being forced to Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears, is expected to attend. U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson is set to visit the park this Thursday to talk about the expansion.

This story was originally published March 20, 2019 at 3:26 PM.