Land conservation group acquires property near Ocmulgee Mounds

by Dave Williams | Capitol Beat Press Service

ATLANTA – A nonprofit organization dedicated to land conservation has acquired two parcels of land in central Georgia that will support efforts to establish the Ocmulgee Mounds as Georgia's first national park.

The Branson Tracts occupy 375 acres in Bibb and Twiggs counties. The Open Space Institute acquired these properties from conservation-minded landowner Martha Bond Branson with the intention of transferring them to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as extensions of the Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, with an area of ​​3400 hectares.

The parcels are located a short distance from the traditional lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park.

More than half a million people live near Bond Marsh, which will provide easy public access to an outdoor recreation opportunity.

“The benefits of protected lands should accrue to everyone,” said Maria Whitehead, senior vice president for Southeast lands at the Open Space Institute. “The protection of the Branson Tracts… is a significant conservation achievement and the next step in the creation of the national park and preserve.

Georgia's two U.S. senators, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, and U.S. Reps. Austin Scott, R-Tifton, and Sanford Bishop, D-Albany, introduced a bill in Congress last month to create a park national and to preserve the Ocmulgee Mountains.

The area is the ancestral home of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and has been continuously inhabited by humans for over 12,000 years. The Muskogean people built mounds there during the Mississippian period, which began around A.D. 900, for purposes of meeting, living, burial, and agriculture.

The Branson properties were saved with help from the Knobloch Family Foundation, the Green South Foundation and the Peyton Anderson Foundation.