Okefenokee

The Okefenokee is the swamp that wouldn't be drained — seven hundred square miles of trembling earth where the peat is fifteen feet deep and the ground shakes when you step on it. The name is the settlers' rendering of the Hitchiti 'land of the trembling earth.' People have lived in it for four thousand years — the Timucua had villages on the islands, the Spanish put missions at the edge, and the Seminoles used it as a refuge during the removal wars until the militia burned their village on Floyds Island and drove them deeper into Florida.

The swamp was a refuge for everyone the outside wanted — fugitive slaves, Civil War deserters, moonshiners, and the 'crackers' who settled the islands and the Trail Ridge and lived off the swamp for a century: herding, hunting, beekeeping, distilling, isolated enough to develop their own dialect, their own ballads, and a folklore the naturalist Francis Harper spent forty years collecting.

The companies tried twice to take it — the Suwanee Canal Company dug twelve miles of drainage canal in the 1890s before giving up, and the Hebard family logged the cypress and pine off the islands until there was nothing left worth cutting. The swamp survived both. It became a National Wildlife Refuge in 1937, and the Suwannee River still rises in its heart — Stephen Foster's 'Swanee River,' the state song of a Florida he never saw, draining out of a Georgia swamp that outlasted every scheme to own it.