Moody Forest: A Family’s Extraordinary Dedication to Big Woods

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As a girl, Janisse Ray listened to stories of a mythic place on the Altamaha River, in the coastal plain of southern Georgia. It was then called Moody Swamp. People got lost back in there; hunters got confused and spent nights in hollow tupelos. People talked of panthers. Alligators marbled the duckweed of shadowy sloughs, and bobcat tracks in the bottoms slowly filled with dark water.

These were not just stories. Moody Swamp was a real place, a very wild place.

Word about Moody Swamp circulated among conservationists, who encouraged the family to sell the property to a conservation organization. The family had no desire to sell. For 15 years conservationists worked to preserve the property. When the last heir to the property died in 1999, the land was put up for auction. Many logging companies were bidding, and so was The Nature Conservancy.

When the birds were opened, The Nature Conservancy of Georgia outbid the loggers, and on October 2, 2000, all 3,500 acres of the Moody Forest, at the tune of 8.25 million, was saved forever.

Since, more acres have been added, bringing Moody Forest to more than 4,000 acres. Some of it is now managed by the State of Georgia as the Moody Forest WMA. The public is welcome to use the land responsibly for hiking, biking, and hunting.

The property contains some of the best riverbottom left in the South, hundreds of acres uncut. The uplands include one of the last pieces of pre-settlement longleaf pine forest left anywhere, replete with red-cockaded woodpeckers and gopher tortoises. A tree-ring scientist bored the trees, and found longleaf pines over 200 years old and massive bald cypress 200 to 600 years old.

The property stretches along miles of the wild, alluvial Altamaha River--refugium for migratory songbirds, endangered swallow-tailed kites, and freshwater mussels found nowhere else in the world.

This anthology, edited by Ray, contains testimonies of people who over the years have known the Moody Forest. These testimonies were originally compiled in an effort to save the forest. Ray invited anyone with any knowledge of, history with, or affection for Moody Swamp to write an essay about it, in order to enter into the public record a testimony of love and a plea for protection.

We don’t have to sit back and watch the things we love get obliterated in front of our eyes. We can defend what is precious to us. And we can win.

Moody Forest proves that.

Thanks to all who worked for its protection, all who have visited and enjoyed it, and all who still work to restore and defend it.