Around 800 years ago, Native Americans grew corn, beans and squash along the streams of the Savannah River. Around 1700, the area played host to Savannah Town, the first inland settlement-and an important trading post-in South Carolina. The Civil War brought a cycle of land abuse and poverty to the land that lasted until 1951, when it was bought by what is now the U.S. Department of Energy with the focus of reforesting abandoned farmland.
That’s the Savannah River Site, and its long and fascinating history is recounted in Ecology and Management of a Forested Landscape, edited by John C. Kilgo and John I. Blake.
Blake is assistant manager for research with the USDA Forest Service. Kilgo is a research wildlife biologist with the USDA Forest Service; he’s also an Athens native and the son of the late James Kilgo, a UGA English professor and noted novelist and essayist.
The book has more Athens links-among the 17 writers who contributed to the book is UGA ecology professor Whit Gibbons, and H. Ronald Pulliam, UGA’s Regents Professor of Ecology, provides the foreword.