A New National Park? ::

Interesting! I'd really like to see this happen.

Posted on Sat, Apr. 25, 2009
Camden park has a shot
Battle site’s chances improve for national park designation
By JOHN MONK
jmonk@thestate.com

After nearly 30 years, the struggle to win coveted national park status for Historic Camden and Battle of Camden sites may be at its most hopeful point.

A bill that would fund a $250,000 National Park Service feasibility study for the site is in a subcommittee of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee.

That — in addition to acquiring more acreage around the site, among other things — could improve the chances for the coveted national park status, some say.

Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., who has been working this issue since the early 1980s when he was first elected to Congress, knows it might take more time — maybe years — to get the $250,000.

“The account out of which this is funded is a very tight account,” said Spratt.

“Basically, what you have to do is get in line. If you don’t have your request in, it may not come up this year, and it may not come up next year, but if you get in line and wait your turn and work it — especially with a meritorious project like this — eventually you get it funded.”

To get funded in Congress, the project has to run a gantlet.

First, it must win subcommittee approval in the House, then get committee approval, then pass a floor vote by the full House. Then, the same process is repeated in the Senate.

If it survives both chambers, it still might face a presidential veto.

The $250,000 already has gone through that process to win approval, or authorization, for spending. Now, Spratt is trying to get the actual spending, the appropriation, approved.

Something similar took place almost 30 years ago.

In 1980, local Camden officials won federal funding for a $250,000 study.

But that study concluded there were too many modern-day encroachments to make the site, a 1780 British garrison on the outskirts of Camden, a national park.

In much of the 1980s and 1990s, efforts to win national park status moved slowly.

But in the past five years, state and local groups and officials, including Sen. Vincent Sheheen, D-Kershaw, and Rep. Laurie Funderburk, D-Kershaw, have worked to acquire land — today, the site is 107 acres — to save a crucial American Revolution battlefield nine miles north of Camden.

It is the site of the 1780 Battle of Camden, where as many as 1,000 Americans patriots were killed in a lopsided British victory. It helped spur Americans on to change course and fight on to victory into the next year.

“The Revolution was a very near thing,” said Spratt, “and the Battle of Camden is an indication that it might have gone the wrong way.

“It helps to appreciate the effort and resilience of the Revolutionary forces. They were able to spring back from something like Camden and win Cowpens, Kings Mountain and the other major battles of the war in the South.”

The current effort by Spratt, local officials and more than two dozen organizations to push both the Historic Camden and Battle of Camden sites for proposed national park status stands a far better chance of approval than the lone Historic Camden site in 1980, said Historic Camden executive director Joanna Craig.

“We’ve been working on this a long time, and there’s been more accomplished in the last four or five years than ever before,” she said. “We’ve moved mountains.”