PELION -- Lexington County's Peachtree Rock is about a 30-minute drive from the bustling heart of South Carolina's capital city. But even as you approach the dirt road abutting the 460-acre preserve that houses some of the state's unique geological features, you can still feel the city's presence on your back.
Outside of the nearby town of Pine Ridge, a large silica mine gouges a hole in the earth, while the encroaching suburban developments cut into old farmland and forest. Signs hawk newly constructed homes starting in the mid-$200,000 range. Recently built mansions stand among rusting double-wide trailers and old graveyards. Shooting ranges intermingle with strip malls.
It's to be expected. South Carolina is booming, after all, ranked by some measures as the fastest-growing state in the nation. And with that growth comes change, stretching out even into the heart of rural Lexington County.
Which makes Peachtree Rock feel so special.
The sound of traffic on State Highway 6 slowly disappears as you meander down the sandy trail until, eventually, you find yourself at the pockmarked sandstone walls of what millions of years ago used to be the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. There is a waterfall, the only naturally occurring one on South Carolina's coastal plain, which stretches from the sandhills beneath North Augusta to the ocean.
Then there are the ruins of Peachtree Rock itself -- a once-majestic monolith of stone that toppled off its narrow base more than a decade earlier due to what law enforcement believed to be a likely mix of vandalism and erosion.
It's a beloved hidden gem in the Midlands. An older couple emerges from the brush with walking sticks and a camera with a telephoto lens to capture the wildlife. Beneath the waterfall, members of the University of South Carolina's Mountaineering and Whitewater Club enjoy a picnic before going to forage for wild mushrooms. Along the trail, another couple sits on a rock outcropping overlooking Little Peachtree Rock, another unique sandstone feature carved out of the nearby cliff face.
But Peachtree Rock is also a crown jewel of South Carolina's Heritage Trust program, a 50-year-old initiative by the state's Department of Natural Resources and organizations like The Nature Conservancy intended to protect not only the state's natural history but its cultural history as well.
The origins of the program date back to the mid-1970s, around the time then-President Richard Nixon helped usher through landmark conservation legislation that helped kick off the national conservation movement.
Through donations, long-private hunting grounds became public in 1974 and, two years later, South Carolina Gov. John West signed the bill that would become the nation's first Heritage Trust Act, with a mission to inventory, evaluate and protect natural features and cultural resources considered to be "the most outstanding representatives of the state's heritage."
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That motivation is apparent in many of the natural areas the state helps preserve. Among the trees of Peachtree Rock lay the ruins of an old moonshine still that likely remained in use until the 1950s -- still bearing the holes left in it by an axe-wielding lawman seeking to terminate the off-the-books operation.
Other sites preserved by DNR's Heritage Trust program, like Cayce's Congaree Creek, are themselves remnants of industrial use. The floodplain's deep pools and elevated trailways are the product of the area's function centuries earlier as a source of clay for the Guignard Brick Works, which provided building blocks for Columbia and other cities around the South. You can even find the trolley tracks once used to transport raw material still embedded in the dirt.
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"It's an area right next to the city of Columbia that feels so isolated," said Meg Gaillard, an archaeologist with the state DNR who grew up near Congaree Creek and does public outreach for the Heritage Trust program. "Even though you're just at the edge of the city, it feels as though you've stepped far beyond the city, and back to nature."
Purists might object to the presence of manmade features left to languish on the landscape. But in some ways, that's exactly the point of the program, Gaillard notes.
Before Columbia grew into the state's capital, Congaree Creek was occupied by Swiss and German settlers and, before that, Indigenous persons who'd settled along the fertile lands along the banks of the Congaree River.
The marks left by those who'd lived there are just as important in understanding an area as if it were a virgin landscape. On some tours of the preserve, Gaillard likes to point high into trees where a segment of trolley track "grew" with a young tree -- a reminder that the landscape existed long before humans arrived there, and would continue to endure long after they're gone.
"You kind of see the natural environment overtaking the cultural in some sense, or melding with the cultural, which is sometimes really cool to see on a hike," said Gaillard.
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Fifty years into the program, there is still much work to be done. Some sites in their care, like Fort Frederick in the Lowcountry, continue to be threatened by rising oceans and erosion. While acquisitions of new sites are still taking place, the pace has slowed in recent years.
Most of the work to be done in the next 50 years, Gaillard said, lies with helping the public build the same conservation ethic that drove the state's leaders 50 years earlier, and ensuring the same care and respect for the land and their heritage they once showed.
"It's part of my job and others to allow the public to become more aware of what we do," she said. "Not just where the properties are, but the stories that they hold."