Cox commits to preserving thousands of acres on Atlantic coast

Putnam said the value of the easement “approaches half a billion dollars in value.” Ducks Unlimited will own the development rights, but said the land will never be built on.

Credit: Special

Credit: Special

“For as long into the future as mankind will be, as long as there is the rule of law, this will be protected,” Putnam said.

Cox, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and its philanthropic arm have made a series of major conservation donations in recent years.

In 2024, for instance, the company donated $100 million to Ducks Unlimited to protect wildfowl breeding habitats in the North American prairies. Last year, the James M. Cox Foundation was part of a coalition of funders that helped The Conservation Fund buy land slated to become a mine on the ecologically sensitive eastern edge of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, a wetlands nominated to be a UNESCO World Heritage site.

In December, the Cox Foundation was the lead funder in a group that purchased hundreds of thousands of acres of Patagonian wilderness in Chile described as South America’s Yosemite.

Unlike those efforts, the announcement in South Carolina covers land the Cox family already owned.

Cox acquired the property some six decades ago as part of a larger land deal, said Jim Kennedy, the company’s former chairman. Cox built a newsprint mill in the Augusta area and needed timberland to run it.

Credit: Courtesy

Credit: Courtesy

The family later sold the mill and most of the timberland, Kennedy said. But it kept Clarendon Farms, which sits between Savannah and Charleston.

Kennedy said the property is where he learned to love duck hunting and appreciate the need to conserve wild places. Two years ago, he said, he sat on a porch overlooking the river and decided he needed to act to protect it.

“We have to save this,” he recalled thinking. “We cannot let it go.”

The property sits on the northern fringe of a fast-growing coastal community.

To the east, it is flanked by a Marine Corps air station, which sends fighter jets roaring overhead for training missions. To the west, across the Broad River, Jasper County has in recent years been the fastest-growing county in South Carolina, the nation’s fastest-growing state.

Credit: Special

Credit: Special

But conservationists say the property is just as valuable for its connection to large expanses of preserved land in a region called the ACE Basin, where the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto rivers flow into the Atlantic Ocean. The area represents one of the largest undeveloped estuaries on the East Coast.

Hundreds of thousands of acres, including many former rice plantations, have been conserved in the area between Beaufort and Charleston, and marshes there stretch out like coastal prairies.

The Clarendon Farms property will bolster a pathway for migratory birds to the ACE Basin from the Savannah River.

At an event announcing the easement, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said the southern tip of his state plays a particularly important role in conservation, even as it has grown rapidly.

South Carolina has more salt marshes than any other state on the East Coast, and Beaufort County, a place where marsh views peek out from behind shopping centers, has the most in the state.

“It is a beautiful, unusual, precious place,” the governor said.