areas in Georgia.” —brochure for the Stephen C. Foster State Park in Georgia
by water from the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge to Big Shoals
The Okefenokee Swamp is where the Suwannee begins. According to Allen Morris’s Florida Place Names the word “Okefenokee” goes back to Hitchiti oki “water” and Creek fenoke “trembling” or, together, “trembling water,” referring to the movement of the spongy bogs, which seem to undulate when walked on. The Creek Indians also referred to the swamp as ekan “land” and fenoke “trembling” or, together, “trembling land.”
The Okefenokee Swamp is the beginning of the Suwannee River. Florida State Archives
The huge swamp, which covers 438,000 acres in southern Georgia and northern Florida, is in large part protected by being part of the 402,000-acre Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and the Okefenokee Wilderness. The swamp, considered by many to be one of the seven natural wonders of Georgia, formed in the last seven millennia by the growth of peat in the relatively shallow basin. Only Florida’s Everglades is a larger freshwater swamp in the South. Just how vulnerable such huge uninhabited, inaccessible areas can be became apparent in 2007, when a wildfire—begun with a lightning strike near its center—merged with another fire and burned more than 600,000 acres of southern Georgia, an area nearly the size of Rhode Island.
Readers of Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” strip know the Okefenokee as the place where Pogo Possum and his friends make their home. Kelly might have chosen the swamp as his locale because of the land’s inaccessibility, mystique, and distance from civilization. The cypress trees in and near the water—with their broad bases and tapered tops—and the Spanish moss draped over many of the trees all add an otherworldliness to the swamp and river. If boaters venture out early enough in the day, before the sun has a chance to heat up the air, they may see an eerie mist rise from the warm river into the chilly air, lending a ghostly vista to the scene.
An eerie mist arises from the river in the early hours.
How that swamp was formed is still not clear. Theories range from its being a lagoon near the Atlantic Ocean or a depression in the Carolina Bay to its being the result of a meteor shower or even the scouring of the land by millions of fish when the area was part of the ocean bottom. Scientists estimate that the swamp formed more than seven thousand years ago, at a time when Native Americans were living in the southeastern part of the present United States.
The Suwannee River begins in the Okefenokee as small channels and creeks (with names like Alligator, Bay, Cane, Jones) slowly join one another and steadily flow south. A major creek, Suwannoochee, enters the river just below Fargo and increases its flow perceptibly. The St. Marys River, which forms the border between Georgia and Florida, drains about five to ten percent of the swamp, while the Suwannee drains ninety percent of the swamp’s watershed. In the late nineteenth century workers dug the Suwa(n)nee Canal across the swamp in an unsuccessful attempt to drain it. When the digging company went bankrupt, the Hebard family of Philadelphia bought most of the land and ran large cypress logging operations from 1909 to 1927. The train tracks of that company and other logging companies into the 1940s can still be seen throughout the area.
Public entrances or landings into the Okefenokee include the Suwannee Canal Recreation Area in Folkston, Georgia; Kingfisher Landing in Race Pond, Georgia; Stephen C. Foster State Park in Fargo, Georgia; and Suwannee River Sill Recreation Area in Fargo, Georgia. A private facility, Okefenokee Swamp Park, provides access near Waycross, Georgia. The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge welcomes several hundred thousand visitors each year, including many foreigners, and thus provides an important economic resource to southeast Georgia and northeast Florida as visitors arrive to take advantage of the chance to see wildlife, canoe or kayak on the streams, and take guided tours.
The river slowly begins to widen.
Only about thirty miles of the Suwannee River are in Georgia. The other 200+ miles are in Florida. The Suwannee, then, is in Georgia and Florida, not Alabama, despite the first words to a 1922 song entitled “Swanee River Blues”: “Dear old Alabama where the Swanee River flows.” As it flows from the Okefenokee and heads for the Gulf, it winds and meanders due to fluctuations in the topography for the last thousand years or so. The river averages about four miles per hour, but that average increases in those spots where the river narrows.
The decaying vegetation of the Georgia swamp injects tannic acid into the river and darkens it, whereas the dozens of clear-water springs in the lower third of the river lighten it to some degree.
The dark hue of tannic water does not appeal to everyone. According to Cynthia Barnett’s recent excellent treatise about water issues in Florida, Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., Walt Disney hated the dark, tannic waters of his theme park near Orlando and insisted that engineers drain the wetlands and transform Mickey’s habitat into one of clear blue waters.
The first easily identifiable beginnings of the river are at the Stephen C. Foster State Park in the Okefenokee Swamp in Charlton County, Georgia. The park’s eighty-acre facility on the banks of the Suwannee, reachable by car or truck via Highway 177, enables visitors to explore the river and surrounding ecosystem with the help of rangers on guided boat trips. The U.S. Congress established the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in 1936, and today the swamp, which extends thirty-eight miles north to south and twenty-five miles east to west, is one of the oldest and best-preserved freshwater areas in the United States. It has an immense quantity of water, which becomes the main source of water for the upper part of the Suwannee, especially as the swamp drains into the river after any kind of rain.
That part of the river is the quietest in terms of human activity and boat traffic. The vastness and relative impermeability of the Okefenokee, which still has a mystique about it, will continue to generate legends of swamp creatures and renegades from the law taking refuge there and hermits making moonshine. But the swamp’s natural beauty, at least along the river, makes it an anomaly in this ever–changing, busy world. In times past, the Seminoles used it as a refuge from both the Creek Indians, from whom the Seminoles split off (the word “Seminole” means “runaway”), and from the whites who wanted to enslave them. Many of those Indians left the safety of the swamp and headed south in the eighteenth century to take up residence in the sparsely settled Florida peninsula.
A 1938 book originally published in the Rivers of America series, Cecile Matschat’s Suwannee River: Strange Green Land, describes some of the people who lived back in the swamp. Because most of the Okefenokee is now part of a federal park, the swamp is mostly uninhabited, but boaters who venture on and off the main tributaries of the Suwannee in Georgia can perhaps picture what a wild, isolated life those people must have lived. Matschat’s book, despite its title, is almost exclusively about the people of the Okefenokee and does not address much about the rest of the river’s domain.
In 1997 the DuPont Corporation planned to start a fifty-year titanium mining operation in southern Georgia, but protests by environmentalists and opposition by government agencies forced the company to abandon the project three years later and give up their mineral rights forever. In 2003, DuPont donated the sixteen thousand acres it had bought for mining to The Conservation Fund. Two years later, officials then gave almost seven thousand acres of the donated land to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.
