When Samantha Siegel's best friend took her to see an old live oak tree on Johns Island in South Carolina, she had no idea it was about to change her life. Samantha was a college student going through a hard time. Her friend just wanted to get her out of the house for a while. They went to see a tree estimated to be 300-400 years old and known as the "Angel Tree." It's 65 feet tall, and it shades approximately 17,000 square feet.
When Samantha placed her hand on the tree, "It just filled me with hope and love," she said, "and it just felt like it was taking all of the negative energy out of my body." Samantha wanted to know more, so she checked at the gift shop to see if there was a book about the tree. There wasn't. Samantha was a history major. "I want to know what happened here," she said, and "I want to know who else's footsteps have walked around this tree." She couldn't stop thinking about it and decided she would research its history.
A week later, a coworker showed her a newspaper article that read, "Angel Oak Village gets final approval."
It stopped Samantha in her tracks. The tree was about to be swallowed by development. In 1991, the city of Charleston, South Carolina, had purchased the two acres where the Angel Oak stood. It became a small park, which protected the tree. However, 35 acres of maritime forest and wetlands habitat which "really are the Angel Oak's home," Samantha said, were about to become apartments, a big box grocery store and "a lot of pavement."
She started with an online petition and called every conservation group in South Carolina to ask: Why wasn't anyone stopping this? "I was pretty enraged," she said. Samantha had no activism experience, but when she could not find anyone who was doing anything to stop the development, she said, "OK, I guess I'm doing something about it."
Samantha learned how to request records using the Freedom of Information Act and even started a nonprofit organization called Save The Angel Oak. She made enough noise that the media took notice and amplified her efforts.
Samantha found mentors and kept learning. She reached out to Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine, Chieftess of the Gullah Geechee Nation. The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of Africans who were enslaved on plantations of the lower Atlantic coast. Queen Quet helped Samantha better understand the historic cultural significance of the Angel Oak. It is considered a witness tree and stands as a historic testament to everything from plantation life in the South during chattel slavery to the Civil Rights Movement.
Dana Beach, the founder of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, also took Samantha under his wing to mentor her as an environmental activist. Samantha filled public meetings with Angel Oak supporters. They posted handmade signs along the highway to get the word out and at every turn "our tactic was delay, delay, delay," she said.
They looked for endangered species and old graveyards and studied old plat maps. In the end, it was the wetlands that saved the Angel Oak. Approximately 4 acres of wetlands on the property had been overlooked. It turned out the developer submitted a plat map that had omitted a stream which connected the wetlands to a federally protected body of water. Samantha contacted the Army Corps of Engineers about the discrepancy and brought them out to the site. In a rare turn of events, the Corps reversed their decision.
That reversal required the developer to spend more money on a federal permit and revise their plans. "But he was as stubborn as I was," Samantha said, "so eventually we went to court over that wetland permit."
Save the Angel Oak and the Coastal Conservation League filed a lawsuit, and the developers settled, agreeing to sell them half of the acreage. Samantha also made sure the bank backing the development was kept abreast at every step. "I sent them every media article, all the controversy, so they knew what was going on," she said. Eventually the bank foreclosed on the loan, and in 2013, Samantha partnered with the Lowcountry Land Trust where she is now the Angel Oak Preserve director. They raised $9 million with the help of the entire community to purchase the total acreage and protect it.
Business owners, state and local elected officials, the Charleston County Greenbelt program, the state conservation bank — and most importantly, over 60,000 individual donors from all over the world — saved the Angel Oak. "It was such a feel-good community effort," Samantha said, "because whether you donated a penny or $1,000, you were part of something so special."
Now, Lowcountry Land Trust and the city of Charleston are working together to create a 44-acre preserve with boardwalk trails, a nature play area for children and educational information about the tree and native people who have held the Angel Oak sacred for hundreds of years.
The fight against the development became so much more than learning about and saving this one tree. "It was protecting the very much living landscape and cultural memory that surrounds it," Samantha said, "So, people in the future can have the same experiences that we had." It united the whole community, and Samantha said, "I've never seen anything like that in my life."
To make a donation to the Angel Oak Preserve, visit: lowcountrylandtrust.org.
Do you know anyone who's doing cool things to make the world a better place? I want to know. Send me an email at Bonnie@WriterBonnie.com. Also, stay in the loop by signing up for her weekly newsletter at WriterBonnie.com. To find out more about Bonnie Jean Feldkamp and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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