Connected Conservation: Local Student Shares Legacy of Service at CCNMP
April is Connected Conservation Month and we are happy to join the National Park Service to tell stories of connecting with partners and communities to protect our shared heritage. This month we welcome guest blogger, Gracie Fogo, (she/her/hers), the Communications Intern with our partners at Southeast Conservation Corps.
Gracie’s reflection on her time working in the summer of 2020 on an all-women crew repairing and preserving a footbridge built 25 years before by an all-men’s cycling volunteer crew, is a wonderful story that connects legacy upon legacy upon legacy. Thank you Gracie for finding this story, telling it so well, and sharing it on our blog for National Connected Conservation Month!
According to SCC Program Communications Manager, it won’t be long before another amazing youth crew (the C4 crew!) will be assigned to a project inside the Chickamauga Battlefield in the CCNMP in the next few months. Be sure to give SECC social media channels a follow so you can keep up with the teams at work this season! @southeastconservationcorps and @conservation_legacy on Instagram, and @southeastconservationcorps and @conservationlegacy on Facebook! (Check out our 2019 C4 gallery here and Conservation Legacy’s SECC’s Flikr album here .)
by Gracie Fogo, (she/her/hers), Communications Intern, Southeast Conservation Corps
Located in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park is a place full of history but also a place of unique community. Often referred to as “the Chickamauga Battlefield” or “Chick-Chatt,” this park is the location where the major battles of the Civil War took place in the south. While tourists come for the history tour, locals come for the hiking, walking, running, and equestrian trails. Members of the community use the park to exercise, meet their friends, and fulfill their daily ritual of commuting to their beloved park.
If you visit frequently, as I did for a month, you will begin to recognize the same people. You will recognize the group of horseback riders who pass through the battlefield and go down through the creek. You will see the same clan of bikers training for their next race. You will say hi to the woman who passes you on the trail every day at lunchtime. You will recognize the older woman who rides her bike around the park and stops everyone she sees to tell them about her Chickamauga Battlefield face mask she made.
If you stop to talk with any of these people, they will surprise you with the fondness they feel towards the park. Some people might begin to tell you not only what the park has done for them but what they have done for the park themselves. For generations, members of the community have dedicated hard work and long hours to their favorite national parks in order to preserve the land and its legacy.
This past summer I worked at the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park on a crew for Southeast Conservation Corps (SECC). SECC is an organization based in Chattanooga, Tennessee that organizes programs for youth to provide them with the opportunity to serve their local community and learn about conservation work. The crew I was a member of was an all-women's youth crew that consisted of four high schoolers and one adult crew leader. We spent 4 weeks together completing projects at the Chickamauga Battlefield and becoming good friends while doing so.
One of the projects I worked on with my crew was to restore a footbridge that connects the visitor’s center to the other areas of the park. When I first walked up to the bridge and saw how weathered the wooden planks were and the beaten path of grass to and from the bridge, I could tell this was a well-worn and beloved part of the park. While we were dismantling the structure, we found little artifacts that told us a fraction of the story behind the footbridge. There was dirt from hiking boots packed between the floorboards and fragments of confetti from a child's birthday party. You could feel the smudge beneath the bridge from when the creek water rose against the bottom from years of flooding. Just like every other structure at the park this bridge has a history and a story. Unlike the rest of the park, its history doesn’t begin with war and battles; it begins with recreation and a bond between running partners.
Bill Kinnaman is a structural engineer and in 1997, along with other members of his running group, designed and built the original bridge. Before speaking with Bill, I had a blurred image of the significance of our work until he pointed out how both our contributions to the Chickamauga Battlefield ties us together. I had the rewarding experience of talking with Bill and listening to him tell the origin story of the bridge after he reached out to SECC to compliment my crew’s work. About a month later, Bill and I were swapping stories on the phone. He told me about his running group, called the Battlefield Runners, made of 15 to 20 men that started running together in 1980. Every weekend, starting at the visitor’s center parking lot, they would run about 20 miles on Saturdays and run around the park loop of 10 miles on Sundays. Over the course of many miles, Bill described, they became close friends. Bill then reported that “the only way for people to get into the park from the visitor center was going across the bridge on Highway 27.
The original Foot Bridge Construction Crew
“This is a dangerous path for pedestrians to take and his running group saw this issue and formulated the idea of building a bridge across that creek that runs through the field connecting the visitor's center to the rest of the park. Being the engineer of the group, Bill “drew up a little sketch on the design of the bridge and stamped it and submitted it to the Park Service.” About a year later the National Park Service approved Bill's plans and instructed them where to build the bridge.
Each of the Battlefield Runners, which consisted of carpenters, power company workers, and steel manufacturers, contributed to the project. For the members of the club running was simply a hobby, they each their owns jobs and various skills which ultimately complemented each other nicely to produce the visitor’s center walking bridge. It is empowering to know that my crew of Environmental Science majors, musical theater performers, and soccer players learned and conquered those skills as well.
An important objective of the maintenance workers of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military, and conservation work in general, is to preserve the land and the structures that make the area special. While the bridge’s origins do not date back to the Civil War, it has been a part of the park for over two decades and serves an important role in the community. It strengthened the accessibility between visitors and the recreational area of the park which contributes to its unique community. My crew was instructed to keep the previous design that I now learn was drawn by Bill making those details even more special. One thing that most hikers don’t think about is the generations of people who have worked on the dirt they walk on or the dozens of hands that set stone steps they climb. On every trail and in every park, there is an invisible legacy of those who came before soaked into the dirt. In this story though, the legacy of the is not invisible or unknown. By connecting with Bill, I was able to catch a glimpse of the legacy of the land I served.
Since this summer, I have returned to the park and the bridge we built a few times. There are no longer rows of uncut lumber on the grass, piles of disrupted dirt, clumps of sawdust, or tools laid out around the worksite. Not much about the bridge has changed, it sits atop the same telephone poles that have always supported it, donated by a local power company, with the only difference being fresh wood and screw in every board instead of nails. The bridge looks perfectly in place and it is hard to believe that just months before it was dismantled and reconstructed by a group of young women.
This is one of the many beauties of conservation work because the goal is not to take old things and modernize them it is to preserve them. Bill described this idea perfectly when he told me “[the bridge’s] life has been lengthened by the fact that you came in there and gave it new life. And that's wonderful.” Bill and his friends built a bridge to connect the community to the park and 23 years later my all-women’s youth crew preserved it.
Hopefully, in the next 20 years, a crew that reflects the new generation of conservationists will make their mark on the park as well. That would be wonderful too.
— SECC’s Women’s Youth Crew was made possible by the National Park Foundation.
Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / Photo Courtesy of Chattanooga Times Free Press
From left, Southeast Conservation Corps team members Juliana Willams, Emily Mathis, Autumn Beeland, Ruth Beeland and Gracie Fogo build a footbridge being build across a stream, in the McDonald Field, just south of the Chickamauga National Military Park's visitor center on Wednesday. SECC operates conservation service programs throughout the Southeast that focus on environmental stewardship. According to their website; "Building upon the legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps, we are focused on connecting people to the natural environment through conservation-based service learning, personal development, and recreation."