Community News

Land purchase could help extend Oklawaha Greenway to BRCC

By Lightning Reports, Published: January 27, 2025

In the future, land next to Jackson Park could be home to a new stretch of the Oklawaha Greenway, winding through restored wetlands and forming part of a link to Blue Ridge Community College.

Conserving Carolina recently purchased 23.6 acres south of the park with frontage on two streams. The tract also contains three acres of wetlands, with potential to restore additional wetlands.

Already, Jackson Park is one of the most popular areas for birding in Henderson County. On E-bird, birders have reported 220 species there, including a wide variety of ducks, sandpipers, herons, hawks, woodpeckers, songbirds and owls. Wetlands on the newly protected land are connected with the bird-rich wetlands in Jackson Park.

“Our goal is to extend the Oklawaha Greenway," says Rebekah Robinson, Conserving Carolina’s assistant director for programs. "That would not only provide community benefits for recreation, health, and transportation, but it would allow us to create a path through an area that is ecologically rich and where wetland restoration could further expand and improve habitat for wildlife.”

Today, if you look at a map of the property, you can see three lines—two streams and a linear wetland—running straight and parallel like streets in a grid. Once, the wetlands probably covered more ground, but over time these waterways were converted into ditches to drain the land. A berm was built along Bat Fork Creek to keep water from spilling over the fields. But ultimately, as storm events and flooding become more severe, this flood-prone property may be better suited for natural floodplain restoration than for agriculture.

At other places where Conserving Carolina has restored natural floodplains, they have proven highly effective at storing water during floods. In fact, during Hurricane Helene, just three natural floodplain projects stored over 1.25 billion gallons of water!

This valuable property could not have been protected without one citizen who has been a key advocate for greenways. Suzanne Hale retired to Hendersonville with her husband in 2010 after serving as ambassador to Micronesia and working for the USDA in Asia. Recently, she provided research that helped to shed new light on local Black history into the Kingdom of the Happy Land, which she learned about from storyteller Ronnie Pepper. Their exploration of the topic helped to inform a new novel, Happy Land, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez.

Hale is also active with Friends of the Oklawaha Greenway and has previously served as chair of the group.

“One of our dreams has always been to connect the Oklawaha Greenway to the Blue Ridge Community College and this will be a really important step in that direction,” she says.

Hale made a significant donation to help Conserving Carolina purchase the land. Additional funding came from the NC Land and Water Fund. In late 2024, Conserving Carolina was able to buy the land after pursuing that goal for more than a decade.

“After many years of effort," Robinson says, "we are thrilled to complete the purchase of this property that is vital for extending the greenway and well-suited to restore wetland habitat for rare species, including endangered species found elsewhere on Bat Fork.  We look forward to the next steps of stream and wetland restoration and acquiring the rest of the corridor needed to extend the greenway to Blue Ridge Community College.” 

Hale adds: “Greenways are important today and they’ll be important to the future. Development is proceeding quickly in Henderson County, so I think saving space for greenways is really important. People will continue to use them to get exercise and get out in nature. And as we get more greenways connected, people will be able to use them more for transportation. ... It’s just amazing when you go out on the greenway to see the variety of people. You see babies in strollers, and kids on skateboards, and older people on scooters, and people on bikes, and little kids learning how to ride bikes, and older people walking their dogs. It’s just amazing how many people use the greenways and how many different ways they use them.”

When the Oklawaha Greenway is extended through this newly protected land, people will be able to pursue those activities in a unique natural environment, full of birds and wildlife, right in the city of Hendersonville.