Georgia Natural Wonder #52 - Heggie's Rock - Columbia County (Part 1). 1,070

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Georgia Natural Wonder #52 - Heggie's Rock - Columbia County (Part 1)

Moving forward in our listing of the National Natural Landmarks of Georgia, we move east and slightly above I-20 near Appling, Georgia. I have never heard of this place. I have got to visit (with an appointment).


Heggie's Rock official NNL photo.

Heggie's Rock is the best example in eastern North America of the remarkable endemic flora restricted to granite outcrops. The site is the least disturbed of all the major outcrops and illustrates the best community zonation. Twelve of the 18 endemic species, subspecies, and varieties associated with well-exposed granitic flatrocks occur at this site.

Location: Columbia County, GA

Year designated: 1980

Acres: 504

Ownership: County, Private

One of Georgia's 12 National Natural Landmarks. It is a private nature preserve owned by The Nature Conservancy.



History

Heggie’s Rock is a spectacular granite outcrop spreading over 60 acres and rising 100 feet high. Heggie’s Rock first appears on the records in March 1769 when Georgia Roseborough petitioned the English government for "100 acres on Little Kiokee Creek, near Big Rock”. The sheer rock expanse is also thought to have been the location of the only two Revolutionary battles fought in Columbia County.



Heggie’s Rock is named for Archibald Heggie, a Scot who acquired the property around 1808 through his wife, Martha Ramsey, whose grandfather built a grist mill on nearby Little Kiokee Creek. In 1983 The Nature Conservancy purchased it from Robert Pollard, a lumber company executive who had bought the land in 1981 to protect it from quarrying. It had been owned by two quarry companies since the 1950’s but thankfully never quarried.



The preserve is near Little Kiokee Creek which joins the Savannah River about eight miles downstream from the preserve. While the preserve includes a perimeter forest of oaks, pines and hickories, it is the granite outcrop, Heggie’s Rock, which dominates. It is here you see exposed granite, lichen and moss covered rock, soil islands and the beautiful vernal pools, or dish gardens, which support rare and unusual plants, and capture the imagination. The preserve is noted for its unusually high diversity of plant and animal life because it includes the dry outcrop, forests and beaver-impounded streams.



Currently owned, preserved, and protected by the Nature Conservancy, Heggie’s Rock is quite the wondrous ecosystem. It is inhabited by extreme plants that have innumerable adaptations to survive without any soil and withstand extreme temperatures. Stunted trees, endangered species and plants only found in two locations in the entire world scatter the landscape of Heggies’s Rock.



Eco-lovers, environmental novices and historians alike will find a visit to Heggie’s Rock fascinating. Surreal "dish gardens" - or shallow pools - support rare plants on a giant, dome-shaped granite outcrop that rises above the neighboring creeks.



There’s no denying Heggie’s Rock is unusual. It happens to be one of the finest remaining examples of a Piedmont flat rock outcrop. But even that description doesn’t capture what it’s like to come upon a 130-acre rock outcrop rising about 70 feet above neighboring Benton Branch and Little Kiokee Creek. It is so exceptional that in 1980 it was designated as a National Natural Landmark.



Heggie’s Rock Preserve spans some 101 acres in Columbia County, about 20 miles from Augusta in eastern Georgia. Over the years, forward thinking individuals, industry and local governments have ensured that Heggie’s Rock was protected. With Heggie’s Rock Preserve, The Nature Conservancy is furthering that goal by working with private groups, volunteers and state and local agencies to monitor the rare plants on the site, eradicate non-native invasive species and protect it from excessive erosion. Development from the rapidly growing Augusta area and nearby Fort Gordon means the site has become vulnerable to unsupervised use. The Nature Conservancy is working to educate the community about the preserve and encouraging supervised tours to showcase this natural wonder.




With so many flowers and leaves in the picture it was hard to get good focus, but here you can see the tiny white flowers that top those bright red leaves (Diamorpha smallii).


This is hairy spiderwort (Tradescantia hirsuticaulis), a much better behaved relative of the usual garden thug, the smooth spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis). But then maybe growing on a rock would be limiting factor!


Elf orpine (Diamorpha smallii) is a showy plant but it is an annual plant - it grows anew from seed every year.


Piedmont sandwort (Minuartia uniflora) with Diamorpha

Another annual plant is Piedmont sandwort (Minuartia uniflora). We found it mixed in with still other annual plants such as bluets (Houstonia sp.), dwarf dandelion (Krigia virginica), and, as shown here, with the Diamorpha. With the thin soil pockets on outcrops, it's not hard to imagine that shallow-rooted annual plants might be very well suited indeed.



The vistas were incredible. It's hard to represent what it looked like - how incredibly talented Mother Nature is when it comes to her own designs.


Here a variety of mosses, lichens, and grasses swirl and mingle with the red Diamorpha


Moss, lichens and Diamorpha.

You might think a granite outcrop presents a harsh environment for plants. We were given a list of plants found on the preserve that was over 20 pages long! There are two pages of lichens alone. Of course only a few of those plants live ON the rock, but there was obviously plenty of places for more deep-rooted ones.



It was fun to find some of the plants we are very familiar with, somehow making it work in pockets of favorable growing conditions here and there. As we finished up our loop trail back to the entrance, we spied this blooming plum (Prunus sp.).



All in all it was a great trip to help us learn about and appreciate one of the many different natural environments in Georgia.



If you’d like to visit Heggie’s Rock, The Nature Conservancy does offer scheduled tours. Open on a limited basis. Group tours available by appointment only.

Columbia County

Now we have some room left on our post, and there is no telling when we will get back here in Columbia County (GNW #237) so I would like to do a Tangent on the County.  Columbia County was formed by an act of the Legislature of Georgia on December 10, 1790; it was formed from part of Richmond County (which was one of Georgia's original seven counties; St. Paul's Parish became Richmond County in 1777). The area had been home to Creek, Euchee, and Cherokee Indians prior to colonization.



One of the oldest archaeological sites in the nation can be found on Stallings Island in Columbia County.



During the Colonial era, settlement of what would become Columbia County in 1790 occurred primarily due to the presence of the second city in Georgia, Augusta. When Georgia became a Royal Colony in the 1750s and was divided into parishes, the area around Augusta became St. Paul's Parish. The primary areas of settlement were Augusta, Wrightsboro (a Quaker settlement named for the Royal Governor), and Brownsborough, which was near the present day location of North Columbia Elementary School. Brownsborough was settled by Scots, mainly from Northern Scotland and the Orkney Islands, brought over by Thomas 'Burnfoot' Brown. We did a tangent on Brown in an earlier wonder post, He was a Loyalist who kicked our ass after patriots almost killed him in lynching. He was eventually captured at battle Augusta.



During the Colonial era, the Church of England was the established church in the State, and it was against the law for anyone to preach contrary to the doctrines of the Church of England. Nonetheless, Daniel Marshall established the first Baptist Church in Georgia in the year 1772 -- Kiokee Baptist Church. This church was located below Brownsboro along the Kiokee Creek in present-day Appling .


Monument to Marshall downtown Appling.

Marshall was born in Connecticut and raised as a Presbyterian; he had become a Baptist and preached in the Carolinas before coming to Georgia. He was arrested thereafter. He would later serve in the militia during the war for independence.



The congregation assembled in six different buildings over the course of its history. From 1772 to 1792 the church met in the log cabin constructed by Daniel Marshall. This small building was similar to Quaker-style constructions of that era, probably twenty feet wide and twenty-four feet long. In 1792 a second building was constructed on the site, or near the site, of the original house of worship at Kiokee Creek. A more commodious brick building became the third church building at the same site in 1808, and it still stands to this day.



Twenty years later a chapel was built in the new town of Appling, in Columbia County. For many years the congregation met at both this and the Kiokee sanctuary.



About 1875 a tornado demolished the Appling chapel, forcing the members to meet in various buildings in town, including the courthouse. A new building, the congregation's fifth, was constructed in Appling in 1907. Finally, thirty years later, a new brick building in town became the sixth house of worship for the Kiokee Church.



The oldest Baptist church in Georgia still retains possession of its 1808 brick building some five miles southeast of Appling. At this location an outdoor camp-meeting arena and a spring-fed baptismal pool now lie behind the aged meetinghouse.



Two small battles occurred in what would become the County during the Revolutionary War between Patriot Militia and Torries; the area was then primarily still frontier and loyalties were badly divided. Legend has it that a small band of Patriots sought refuge from marauding Tories at the County's most anomalous geological feature, Heggie's Rock. One of these fights occurred on September 11th, 1781, between the forces of Elijah Clarke and a band of Torries and British Soldiers.


Clarke.

George Walton, the Virginia-born statesman who signed the Declaration of Independence, resided in what would become Columbia County, as did William Few and Abraham Baldwin, who would later participate in the Federal Convention that framed the United States Constitution. We speak about these three in multiple post as they are the founding fathers of Georgia and University of Georgia.


Walton – Few – Baldwin.

Just before and immediately after the Revolution, large numbers of Virginians and North Carolinians settled in the parts of Georgia above Augusta, including the area around Brownsborough. After the Revolution, there arose a controversy as to whether Augusta or Brownsborough should be the County Seat of Richmond County; it was decided instead, on the insistence of William Few, that the County would be partitioned. The new County formed from Richmond was named "Columbia" in honor of Christopher Columbus; however, the separation did not end the controversy concerning where the seat of government would be located. The citizens of Columbia County turned to arguing amongst themselves. Apparently, one courthouse was built in Brownsborough, and another at Cobbham. The Courthouse at Cobbham was used; and Brownsborough in short order ceased to exist. I always heard the disgrace of Thomas Brown was the reason the town disappeared. His fighting for the Crown and being exiled to the Caribbean after the war, can’t have a city named after him. In 1793, part of the County was taken, combined with part of Wilkes County, and formed into Warren County.



Around 1799, a citizen named William Appling deeded to the county a tract of land for the purpose of building a Courthouse, since apparently the structure in Cobbham had either fallen into disrepair or burned. The tract of land was near Kiokee Creek and the Baptist Church that Daniel Marshall founded. A courthouse was constructed, and served the county until around 1808. The small town that existed around the Church and Courthouse came to be known as "Columbia Courthouse." In 1809, the Baptist congregation left the town and constructed a new meeting house several miles away (the building which is still standing) near the junction of Kiokee and Greenbrier Creeks. That same year, construction began on a new courthouse, which was completed in 1812. In 1816, Columbia Courthouse was charted as the Town of Appling, named for the Appling family that had donated the land to the county and for Col. John Appling, a local resident that had died in a campaign against the Seminoles.



Addendum to original post, John's son, Daniel Appling had a distinguished military career. Daniel Appling is known as Georgia's most prominent soldier in the War of 1812. His reputation stemmed from an action at the Battle of Sandy Creek on Lake Ontario in upstate New York in 1814.



There, Appling's command of around 130 riflemen and a similar number of Oneida Indians effectively ambushed and prevented a force of approximately 200 British marines from seizing naval stores and guns that the American navy was moving by boat to the Sackets Harbor shipyard. The clash lasted approximately ten minutes. Ultimately, Appling is said to have killed 14 sailors and marines, wounded 30, and taken 143 prisoners. One American was killed. The naval guns and stores reached Sackets Harbor without further incident, and the British blockade was withdrawn.



In September, Appling and 110 riflemen, along with the New York cavalry, successfully fought delaying actions against a British force of more than 8,000 men advancing toward Plattsburgh. Appling County (Baxley) is named after him.



Oh man I was bummed they lost the Appling Sword the State of Georgia awarded to him, but they found it.



Appling was the political, educational, social, and religious center of the County. Near Appling were located Mt. Carmel Academy and Columbia Institute. Mt. Carmel Academy was run by the famous Southern educator, Moses Waddel; it was here that John C. Calhoun and William H. Crawford were educated. Columbia Institute was started by a certain gentleman pretending his last name was Bush; he was none other than the David Bushnell of revolutionary war submariner fame. Additionally, during the Georgia Gold Rush of the 1820s, some successful prospecting and mining occurred in Columbia County.



Addendum to original post on David Bushnell, the father of American Submarine warfare. Surviving paperwork showed he designed a submarine and a torpedo.


Wow, two pretty good addendum tangents Daniel Appling and David Busnell.

In the 1830s, when the Georgia Railroad was established, it was decided that to have the trains passing near Appling would disturb the proceeding of the Court, so the railway that passed through the County from Augusta went well below Appling. Also in the 1830s, when the Augusta Canal was constructed, the project required Columbia County to co-operate, since the beginning of the canal and the locks were to be in Columbia County.



In 1855, the Courthouse in Appling received a major overhaul, and after the remodeling was complete, the building was in more or less its present form; apparently, despite the extensive project, the shell of the 1809-1812 building was retained.



Plantation agriculture was the prevailing way of life in the County prior to the American Civil War, and a number of vast plantations existed, the central houses of some of which still exist. The Woodville in Winfield, Georgia is a building from 1814. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.


Woodville

There were times when the slave population outnumbered the free white population. When Georgia seceded from the Union, it was a native son of Columbia County, called out of retirement, that presided over the Secession Convention, George Walker Crawford.  Crawford had previously been the only Whig governor of the State. Crawford also served as United States Secretary of War from 1849–50 under Zachary Taylor.


Crawford.

Men from the County served in several companies, amongst them being the Hamilton Rangers and the Ramsey Guards, some in the 48th Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and some in the 22nd; almost all in Wright's Brigade. The troops assembled in front of the Courthouse, then went and boarded trains at the depots then in existence in the County (Berzelia, Sawdust, Dearing, Thomson). No actual fighting occurred in the County during the war; nor was it directly in General Sherman's path. However, according to some family stories, some Union Cavalry scouts or bummers did enter the county. Near the war's end, the remnants of the Confederate treasury were taken through Columbia County from Augusta to where the Chennault Raid occurred in neighboring Lincoln County.


Chennault Plantation.

Addendum to original post. Almost all of the Confederate assets were dispersed, to pay soldiers returning home, before the capture of Davis on May 10, 1865, near Irwinville. The remaining funds from the Richmond banks were left in Washington, Georgia. A detachment of Union soldiers set out to divert this specie to a railhead in South Carolina, but on May 24, 1865, bandits in Georgia attacked the wagons, which had stopped for the night at the Chennault Plantation in Lincoln County. Of the cache, $251,029 was lost. Bank officials eventually recovered some $111,000 of the stolen money. Union general Edward A. Wild led a search of the area for more gold and earned notoriety for the arrest and torture of the Chennault family, who Wild believed were hiding gold but who turned out to be innocent. As a consequence, Union general Ulysses S. Grant removed Wild from his command.



The war took a heavy toll on the white male population of the county; a plaque behind the bench in the main Courtroom bears the names of Columbia County's Confederate dead. During Reconstruction, the County was subject to military occupation, it being attached to a special district including Warren, Wilkes, and Oglethorpe Counties that additional Union forces were sent to due to considerable Klan violence reported by the Freedman's Bureau (whose reports also detail a mob lynching which occurred in Appling in July of 1866).


Lynching in Georgia.

The controversy over the location of the courthouse reared its head again due to railroad related growth in the town of Thomson. In 1870, part of Columbia County (including Thomson, Dearing, and Wrightsboro) was combined with part of Warren County to form McDuffie County, which was named after South Carolina Senator George McDuffie. Thomson was made county seat of the new county. Appling was nearly wiped off the map by a tornado in the 1870s, and for all intents and purposes, it never regained the prestige it had prior to the tornado and the War Between the States.


Appling today.

The remainder of the 19th century saw the development of the county school system, and the birth of the Cities of Harlem and Grovetown. Harlem began in the 1880s when a disgruntled railroad employee by the name of Hicks, angered by saloons and sabaath breaking in Sawdust, moved along the tracks one mile east and set up a rival town, complete with its own depot. Sawdust eventually was more or less eclipsed by Harlem, losing its depot and being absorbed by Harlem in the 1920s. The City was named after Harlem, New York. We should mention it was birthplace of Oliver Hardy. The town sure capitalizes on that with an annual celebration. Grovetown, named for Grove Baptist Church, began as a resort town for wealthy Augustans to get away to; it had its genesis also in the 1880s. Also, a strange incident concerning a religious cult camping along Steiner Creek occurred during this era. Can't find any info if someone knows anything.



The twentieth century saw drastic change in the County. In 1917, Harlem was badly damaged by fire. Additionally, the process of bringing electricity to the County began. Men from Columbia County answered the call of duty and served bravely in both World Wars. Prior to World War II, the County was still almost completely agricultural--cotton was still king. Camp (later Fort) Gordon was established, absorbing for the United States Army a large portion of Richmond County and parts of Columbia, McDuffie, and Jefferson; when this installation was kept following the war, the course of history for the entire Augusta area including Columbia County was forever changed. Also, the Clark Hill Dam was constructed, and a considerable area of northern Columbia County was submerged under the new reservoir.



Between 1950 and 1990, the population increased dramatically. Agriculture likewise declined majorly, the County becoming largely a residential area for persons employed in Augusta. A considerable number of persons stationed at Fort Gordon eventually settled in Columbia County. The schools were integrated largely without incident under the wise leadership of Superintendent John Pierce Blanchard, and the unincorporated communities of Martinez (formerly Lulaville, named after a Cuban Doctor) and Evans (named after a Confederate General) become the population centers of the county since they were nearest to Augusta. And yet again, the location of the Courthouse and seat of government reared its head, and today, Evans is for all intents and purposes de facto county seat, being the location of an expansive new Courthouse Annex and other government offices. Appling lost its town charter in 1995 and today is a nearly dead town.



Well that was enough for our original post, we already added several addendums as mentioned. But, we did not list the National Register of Historic Places listings, Historical Markers and War Memorials, Communities, or Notable People in Columbia County, Georgia. So we came back to Columbia County with Mistletoe State Park as Georgia Natural Wonder #237 , we do a second tangent on Columbia County 185 Wonders later. It would mess the whole the whole Forum up trying to squeeze it in here. I do present one of the finalist for all time GNW Gals.


Explore the rock with today's GNW gal.

Contact the Nature Conservancy. One more National Natural Wonder before the road trip to Baton Rouge, we hope to be getting on the right Tract with this next one.