Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp.

Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp. By Megan Kate Nelson. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2005. Pp. xviii, 262. $34.95, ISBN 0-8203-2677-1.)

Megan Kate Nelson has tapped a voluminous wealth of source materials to produce a cultural study of Georgia's great Okefenokee Swamp. She examines not only the Okefenokee itself but also a forty-mile radius around the swamp, which she styles the Okefenokee hinterlands. She views the swamp and the various actors who have impacted it through the lenses of "ecolocalism." As Nelson defines ecolocalism, it "is a concept that provides an alternative way of thinking about the creation of culture in relation to natural environments" (p. 5). She adds that "ecolocalism conceives of cultural identity as rooted in a locale oriented to a specific ecosystem and as divisive and variable over time" (p. 5).

Nelson explores the interactions between the Okefenokee and African American slaves, Seminoles, various would-be developers, and the white settlers known as swampers. Beginning with the colonial and antebellum periods, Nelson traces the attempts by planters and slaves to transform the swamps of the Okefenokee hinterlands into rice fields. She also relates the well-known story of how slaves utilized the swamps to subvert and modify the restrictions of bondage.

The next disturbance of the primeval swamp occurred when various skirmishes were fought in and near the Okefenokee during the First (1817-1818) and Second (1835-1842) Seminole Wars. Naturally, the greater knowledge of swamp environs possessed by the Seminoles allowed them to use the landscape to their military advantage. However, Nelson postulates that although the swamps enabled the Seminoles to elude capture and defeat, these confrontations drew attention to these largely undisturbed and unsettled areas, which led directly to serious attempts to extract the wealth of resources contained within the Okefenokee.

After the Seminole Wars, certain Georgia state officials and private entrepreneurs were convinced that fortunes were to be made if the Okefenokee could be drained and converted to agricultural use. A number of land surveys were conducted--a first step toward draining the enormous acreage. These surveys have been invaluable primary sources for this study. The most successful economic development, however, did not involve agriculture but rather the harvesting of the Okefenokee's ancient cypress stands between 1909 and 1927. For nearly two decades the Hebard Lumber Company of Philadelphia engaged in a lumbering operation that at one time was classified as the largest in the state. The white swampers were evicted as the company progressed from one logging tract to another. This industrial incursion disrupted the subsistence lifestyle of the swampers, who had engaged in farming, herding, hunting, and fishing within the swamp for generations. An ambivalent relationship between the lumber company and the swampers developed as numbers of the dispossessed residents gained employment in the lumber mills and logging operations.

Once the Hebard Lumber Company completed its despoliation of the cypress, scientists successfully lobbied the federal government to convert the area from private holdings to a wildlife refuge in 1937. Subsequently, remaining swampers were relocated in an effort to restore it to a pristine condition.

Overall, this book in an intriguing read. Nelson's descriptions of the cypress milling operations, in fact, are some of the best this reviewer has encountered. A brief discussion of the Okefenokee's hydrology would have been beneficial and would have explained what natural factors made it difficult or impossible to drain the swamp. Furthermore, she teased this reader with a reference to the "six different kinds of swamp ecosystems" within the Okefenokee with no further explanation (p. 2).

MARY ELLEN WILSON

Middle Georgia College