Last in a three-part series

Getting to the Three Sisters Swamp to paddle amongst the ancient bald cypress trees is a relatively easy, laid-back trip down the Black River.

Venturing through the swamp, its watery floor littered with fallen branches, downed logs and fields of cypress knees, is a different story.

Some passages are just wide enough for kayakers and canoeists to slip through. Paddlers sometimes have to push, pull, scoot and rock their way through the intricate swamp forests’ maze.

“You see something different every time you come through here,” said Cebron Fussell.

It was a while before Fussell, leading a group of 10 kayakers and canoeists, most members of the Friends of Sampson County Waterways, spotted a familiar, neon-colored ribbon he uses to mark paddling paths.

Fussell is no stranger to the Black River, having paddled it countless times. It’s hard to imagine traversing through Three Sisters without someone as experienced as him as a guide.

Three Sisters is about 4 miles down the river from where the paddlers put in at Henry’s Landing, privately owned land opened to those willing to pay a small fee to access the river.

A yard sign, white with black lettering, is staked next to the dirt drive leading from the road to the landing: “NO Black River State Park.”

Those words echo throughout the riverside community, members of whom argue a state park would damage the river’s ecosystem, heighten the trespassing problems in which they deal with, and burden, in some cases, resource-strapped emergency first responders.

Out of the Blue

Riverfront property owners learned about the proposed Black River State Park after it was introduced into legislation earlier this year.

Up to that point, there had been no public meeting, no notice that such a proposal was coming down the pike, property owners say.

“They pushed this through the House without ever coming to this area and having the first meeting,” said Ivanhoe resident Donna Sykes. “I started a petition because the people who do not want a state park in our area are not being heard.”

She’s collected more than 1,300 signatures, names including that of Harold Corbett.

“I’m dead set against it,” Corbett said. “I don’t like the way they went about it. If I hadn’t heard about it from somebody who told me I wouldn’t have known a thing about it. The way they went about it was underhanded. My whole family feels the same way.”

Corbett lives in Atkinson, a small Pender County town near the Bladen County line. He lives closest to the Black River of his siblings, whose family land stretches 3 miles along the river and more than 600 acres in Sampson County.

The land has been in the family for more than 100 years.

They tend to the land and enjoy its natural resources, hunting and fishing off the Black River’s banks.

“I want to be left alone on my property,” Corbett said. “We’ve taken care of it. The state can’t even mow the shoulder road. They want to tell me how to run my own property?”

More people, more problems?

Despite park officials’ assurances that private land would not be taken via eminent domain, riverfront property owners remain leery.

There are only a handful of river accesses, including private property launches, along the nearly 70-mile-long river.

Riverfront property owners interviewed for this story said they do not know how the state intends to add more launches if they do not own the riverfront property necessary to do so.

Avid river paddlers like Fussell would like to see more public river access, but, he admits his feelings are mixed about the prospect of additional accesses drawing more people to the river, particularly Three Sisters.

During a series of state-sponsored community meetings held during the course of the late summer and early fall, parks officials gave a loose estimate that upwards of 50,000 people may visit the river each year.

“This area can no way withstand that many people,” Sykes said.

“Even if you break it down to 140 people a day in that river, you’re going to see a lot of negative impact on the ecosystem, on the wildlife. There’s going to be so much trash. There’s going to be so much trespassing. There is no water rescue here. The Ivanhoe Volunteer Fire Department doesn’t have a boat. There are no restaurants here. We like it like that. It is literally an untouched area. The reason that it’s so beautiful is the lack of people here. We’re happy for people to come visit the area, but we’re not looking to advertise.”

The Sampson County Board of Commissioners in July adopted a resolution in support of the proposed state park, stating a park would allow people to “enjoy this natural resource, promote tourism and economic growth.”

Commissioners in Bladen County, which could host a large chunk of the proposed park, have had little discussion about it, according to board Chairman Charles Peterson.

“I did go to the (state) meeting,” Peterson said. “Personally, I live on the other side of the county, but I’d have to lean toward the people of that community. The more I know about it, I would say I would be against it because I’m not well versed on what’s going to happen down there. It’s a beautiful place. The thing that bothers me about state land is we have thousands and thousands of (acres of) state land in Bladen County that we don’t get tax (revenue) off of.”

Bladen County Commissioner-at-large David Gooden also pointed out that state-owned land equates to no tax revenue.

“In my opinion the state owns enough land in Bladen County,” Gooden said. “And, people in that area do not want it. I know a lot of those people that live down there. They don’t want a bunch of people down there and I respect that.”

Sykes said she hopes Sampson County commissioners will rescind their vote.

“You can get on the river if you want to get on the river and we’re not trying to keep anybody off the river,” she said. “We just do not want them to funnel that many people through this area. I’ve lived here for 40 years and it looks the exact same as it did 40 years ago. The reason is because we’re so rural and so far out. All the neighbors help each other. Most people farm in some way. The cypress trees are already on Nature Conservancy land. Everything is protected. Nobody can log them. You can’t even hardly get to them.”

She said she fears the same for novice paddlers drawn to the proposed park that try to navigate the river and swamps. Cell phone reception is, at best, spotty along parts of the river. If someone gets in trouble, Sykes said, they may not be able to call for help and, if they do, it may take rescuers a long time to reach them.

Sykes’ concerns are a consistent theme among those arguing against the prospect of a state park.

“The point is we don’t want 50,000 people in there tearing this place up,” said riverfront property owner Paul Turlington. “It will destroy it.”

Turlington owns 10 acres just below Three Sisters in Bladen County.

He doesn’t want a park. He doesn’t want any part of the river designated natural area. The option of “nothing” was not available on surveys offered to those who went to the state-sponsored meetings, he said, only what they wanted in a park.

“The Nature Conservancy owns all the land that is important to the trees,” Turlington said.

Rachel Giddens’ family owns a little fewer than 200 acres along the Black River near the South River. Giddens is a blueberry farmer. The land has been in her family for decades.

“The influx of people through here if they open a park, it’s just going to devastate the area,” she said. “The river would change. If those trees weren’t there, I probably wouldn’t be as worried about it. I care about the area. I care about those trees.”

She fears converting portions of the river into state park would change the culture in which her family has a rooted history.

“Our family used to run the steamboats to Wilmington and back hauling supplies,” she said. “We’ve left the riverside natural. It’s everyday life to be on that river, to be a part of that river. We are a part of that river and that river is a part of us.”

Learn More

• Black River State Park Feasibility Study

Second in a three-part series.

David Stahle has a way of verbally painting a picture of the Black River that taps into your inner explorer and leaves you thinking, “I want to see it.”

“There’s only one Black River, North Carolina,” he said. “It’s one of the greatest natural areas in the world. Nowhere else in the world do you have 1,000-, perhaps 2,000-year-old trees that are growing out of the water where you can kayak amongst them. I’ve been to many of the oldest known tree sites in the world. None of them are growing from a river as beautiful as the Black River.”

Stahle is the University of Arkansas professor who discovered the ancient bald cypress trees growing along river banks and swamps by accident in the 1980s while doing research on the relationship between cypress tree growth rings and climate change.

News of the ancient trees made various publications, piquing the interest of explorers wanting to see the majestic trees and conservation groups wanting to preserve them.

“We’ve been acquiring property there since 1991,” said Debbie Crane, The Nature Conservancy’s communications director.

Today, The Nature Conservancy owns and manages more than 2,200 acres, including the Three Sisters Swamp, in its Black River Preserve and monitors conservation easements on more than 260 acres of privately owned land.

In all, about 14,500 acres have been protected primarily through partners, including the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust, according to The Nature Conservancy’s website.

“If you’ve got the oldest trees on the East Coast you want to make sure they don’t get shovel logged,” Crane said. “We want to make sure we get the prime property to protect it. We’re just lucky these trees didn’t end up mulch in someone’s yard. We’re always looking for property there and probably will continue to buy property.”

A Black River State Park?

Throughout its nearly 70-mile stretch from its headwaters in Sampson County over into Pender County then Bladen County, where it flows into the Cape Fear River, much of the Black River’s waterfront property is privately owned.

There are two public wildlife boat accesses on the river.  The first is a North Wildlife Resources Commission ramp at Ivanhoe Road in Sampson County. The second is at Hunt’s Bluff roughly 20 miles downriver in Bladen County.

A couple of private property owners allow access from their properties for a nominal fee. These are popular spots for kayakers and canoeists who enjoy paddling the stretch of river that accesses Three Sisters.

“No Trespassing” signs are posted on either side of the river’s banks, but the warnings routinely go unheeded, property owners say.

Groups like Friends of Sampson County Waterways, a club whose members help maintain and preserve that county’s waterways, have obtained permission from some riverfront property owners to stop for lunch and take breaks during paddle trips.

“We would like people to enjoy it as much as we do,” Crane said. “Right now, the prettiest places, we own. Making it a public park would open those areas. We just think it belongs in public ownership. ”

In March, House Bill 353 was introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly. That bill included a proposal for a Black River State Park.

The proposed Black River State Park had been cut out of the bill when legislators passed it in June. By then, mounting backlash from riverfront property owners had reached the halls of the General Assembly.

The North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation is currently doing a feasibility study on the proposed park, as directed in the version of the bill Gov. Roy Cooper ultimately signed in July. The division, along with The Nature Conservancy, recently held a series of community meetings in the three counties through which the river flows.

“We’ve got a lot of local support from some counties and not from others,” said Katie Hall, state parks and recreation spokeswoman. “We’ve definitely heard a lot of concerns from citizens about too many people coming to the area and damage occurring to the ecosystem.”

Parks officials estimate a Black River State Park would draw each year roughly 50,000 visitors, an estimate officials based on the numbers of visitors to the Lumber River State Park.

“It’s just a best guess based on the closest linear park with a few accesses and facilities,” Hall said.

Still, that number alarms some property owners, who raise numerous concerns ranging from trespassing to pressure on small, local first-responder resources.

Hall said the meetings parks officials hosted earlier this fall were held to try and set the record straight.

“There’s a misconception that state parks are involved in taking property and forcing people to sell their land,” she said. “We don’t do that. We only work with willing private land owners.”

The parks service has three goals: conservation, recreation and education.

“Conservation really rises to the top as the focus and the most critical aspect of what we do,” she said. “When we have a resource like (the Black River) in our state our priority is to incorporate that property into our park system. It protects that area from ever being developed in a way that is harmful to that ecosystem. The idea would be we would purchase property from the nature conservancy that would protect the most delicate natural resources.”

The feasibility study area includes roughly 2,600 acres and 45 miles of the river corridor, although that’s not an indication of the area proposed for a park. A state park size or area has not been proposed, Hall said.

There are also options in lieu of a state park.

The river could be designated a state natural area or be added to the state trail system. Natural areas are those designed for viewing wildlife, nature and conducting research without the presence of recreational amenities.

Part of the state parks’ study is looking at what option is most appropriate for the river, Hall said.

The parks’ study must look into the accessibility of the river, gauge the local communities about the proposed state park, identify potential impacts on those communities and the river’s ecosystem, and estimated cost to develop the park.

Parks officials have to report their findings to the Legislative Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Natural and Economic Resources by March 1, 2018.

“There will be more meetings later in the year and, in the meantime, the study will continue,” Hall said. “Considering the very delicate nature of these resources, I think everyone would agree that the focus here would be accesses to these natural resources with great respect for them and not leaving a trace behind.”

Anyone wishing to participate in the study may submit comments to dpr.masterplancomments@ncparks.gov.

Learn More

• House Bill 353
• The Nature Conservancy: “Protecting the Ancient”

Read Part 1: History, Ancient Trees

Next: Why Locals Oppose Park

Update April 23, 2018: Study Recommends State Park on Black River

First in a three-part series.

BLADEN COUNTY – Roughly at the halfway mark of the Black River, some of nature’s old treasures reach up through the water and tower over the remote swamp where they’ve grown for centuries.

The trunks of the ancient bald cypress trees here are hollow, knotty and gnarled, a visual testament to their age.

Their roots, or “knees” as they’re called, pepper the spaces between the trees throughout the swamp. Hundreds of these knobby, stalagmite-like knees, some 4 to 5 feet tall, jut from the water.

This is the Three Sisters Swamp, a majestic area of the Black River, which widens and narrows, curves and turns for about 70 miles from its beginning at the confluence of Great Coharie Creek and Six Runs Creek in southern Sampson County to where it empties into the Cape Fear River some 14 miles north of Wilmington.

Three Sisters Swamp, given its name because of how the swamp exits via three distinct channels into the river, showcases some of the more than 1,000-year-old trees thriving within the Black River.

In the 1980s, while conducting research tying cypress tree ring growth to studying the history of climate change, University of Arkansas Professor David Stahle discovered the Black River to be home to some of the oldest living trees in the world.

One of the trees cored and tagged is 1,654 years old “and counting,” according to Stahle.

“That’s a core sample I took in the mid-1980s,” he said in a telephone interview. “I took it 15 feet above the ground so that’s the minimum age of that tree. We believe there are much older trees in there. We don’t really know yet.”

Since that discovery, conservation and environmental groups, with the help of some private property owners, have taken steps to protect more than 14,000 acres, according to The Nature Conservancy.

Now, much to the ire of many riverfront private property owners, the Division of Parks and Recreation is considering buying land owned by the conservancy around the river.

Steamboat Alley

The Black River has a history as rich as its tea-colored water.

Long before paddlers enjoyed the quiet, scenic views of mostly undeveloped riverfront land here, the river was a passageway for transporting people and goods.

Settlers in the 1700s began using flats or pole boats in the river. Before that, modern-day paddlers like to point out, Native Americans navigated the river in canoes.

Following the Civil War, technological advances introduced the use of shallow-draft steamboats on the Black River.

In an effort to encourage area trade, the Black River Navigation Co. was formed in the mid-1870s. With the assistance of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the river was dredged to make an accessible steamboat route.

Steamboats hauling everything from lumber and wood products to cotton, rice and livestock ferried back and forth between Wilmington and Sampson County’s Clear Run community, which was the head of navigation on the river.

Naval stores, or materials used to build and maintain ships, and lumber were the primary cargo of steamboats navigating the Black River between 1875 and 1914.

One of the largest steamboats that traveled the river was a 57-ton stern-wheel named the A.J. Johnson.

According to the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, the steamer was built at Clear Run in 1899 and operated until it sank where it was tied up in Clear Run during a storm in 1914.

The steamer’s hull remains at the river’s bottom, as does an intact pole boat farther downriver in Bladen County.

The River and Research Today

Hints of the river’s past lie in the few remaining steamboat landings on private property.

It’s hard to imagine large steamboats navigating the river with its undulating width and depths. Large branches and entire fallen trees clog the river, making even kayaking or canoeing tricky.

As the river has been allowed to return to its more natural state, its water quality has improved since its days as a navigable body.

Though, as one vigilant riverkeeper points out, runoff from hog farms along the upper part of the river in Sampson County are a source of pollution, the Black River is designated outstanding resource waters.

The river received that classification in May 1994 from the then-North Carolina Department of Natural Resources, now the Department of Environmental Quality.

The riverfront itself remains mostly undeveloped.

Much of the privately owned land along the river is rural landscape dotted by farms of row crops and blueberry fields, seemingly far away from river’s banks, from the river’s view.

During a mid-August trip from Arkansas to the river, Stahle and a group of graduate students traversed the swampy forest to core, tag and map the locations of the ancient trees.

Their locations and size, which Stahle describes as “massively buttressed trees,” make them a challenge to core.

“You have to actually climb the tree and get to a third of the way up to get the solid wood and even then it’s not solid in many cases,” he said.

For that reason, he and the group of student researchers were selective in choosing the trees they cored, looking for the oldest they could find.

In all, they only cored about 20 trees in a week.

“It’s far from efficient, what we’re doing,” Stahle said.

The core samples are being used by researchers in two ways: The samples reveal the ages of the trees and they provide a window into the history of climate change in the region.

Cypress trees form very distinctive concentric growth bands, Stahle said. These bands can be counted, starting with the outermost ring, and dated to the calendar year.

“Then, if you look at those rings, they have an amazing variability of width from one year to another,” Stahle said. “What’s going on there is climate is affecting tree growth. In moist years, they grow well. In dry years, they grow poorly. You can use that climate-induced pattern of ring variability to synchronize going back hundreds of years in time.”

The history of drought and moisture variability, he said, reveals drought conditions during Colonial times.

In 1587, the year Virginia Dare was born and Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony last seen, tree ring widths indicate it was the driest year in 800 years, Stahle said.

There’s been an increase in wetness in eastern North Carolina since the 17th century and into the 21st century, although not a dramatic change, he said.

“This is very valuable for dating past climate,” Stahle said.

Stahle’s research has him returning to the Black River, but “not enough.”

“We’re really just scratching the surface,” he said. “These streams contain not only living trees, but (also) dead wood that litter the forest floor and are often submerged when the water’s high. Some of those logs are so-called storm logs that simply fell over and sank to the bottom of the creek and maybe have been there for 10,000 years. We’re trying to map those areas that are left. Some of them are privately owned. Some are public properties. On those public properties we don’t know necessarily what’s super ancient. If we can provide those agencies with the specific information, it may assist their management efforts going forward.”

Next: Park Study Underway