Four Holes Swamp

Four Holes Swamp hid two kinds of freedom. The sixty-mile ribbon of flooded forest in the South Carolina lowcountry — named for the four deep 'holes' where the water runs — was maroon country: the swamp where people escaping slavery took refuge beyond the reach of patrols, communities living in the cypress stands the plantation world couldn't enter. The Network to Freedom designation recognizes what the swamp always was — a refuge where freedom seekers like James Matthews disappeared into the oldest trees.

The same swamp was Francis Marion's — the Swamp Fox's hunting ground in the Revolution, the flooded forest where his militia vanished between raids on the British. And in the twentieth century it hid a third treasure: the largest remaining virgin stand of bald cypress and tupelo gum on Earth — trees a thousand years old that the loggers somehow missed, now the Francis Beidler Forest sanctuary.

The Audubon boardwalk puts visitors inside the oldest part — the cypress cathedral where ivory-billed woodpeckers were reported as late as 2006, where the same flooded silence that hid maroons and Marion's men holds the last old-growth swamp in the Southeast. The swamp that hid freedom kept its forest; the forest that survived the loggers keeps the swamp's oldest secret.

Four Holes Swamp is the archive's refuge file — the South Carolina swamp that sheltered maroons escaping slavery, hid Francis Marion's militia, and preserved the world's largest virgin cypress-tupelo forest in the Beidler sanctuary.