Four Holes Swamp and Francis Beidler Forest, SC: Visit Guide

Four Holes Swamp is a blackwater swamp that rises in Calhoun County and runs about 62 miles to the Edisto River, with no single channel to speak of. In its middle, near Harleyville in Dorchester County, the National Audubon Society’s Francis Beidler Forest protects more than 1,800 acres of bald cypress and tupelo gum that were never cut, including trees past a thousand years old. A 1.75-mile boardwalk takes you through it. It is open Wednesday through Sunday; adult admission is $12.

What is Four Holes Swamp?

Wikipedia calls it a small blackwater river and a tributary of the Edisto, 62 miles from source to mouth. It does not behave like a river. There is no main channel. Water moves through a braid of channels that start, disappear, and start again, which is why the old name is a swamp and not a creek. The water is dark because it carries tannin from leaves and wood breaking down in it, the same reason the Edisto is dark.

The sanctuary lies in parts of Dorchester, Berkeley, and Orangeburg counties. Its watershed covers about 430,000 acres, roughly a third of the Edisto basin, and the Edisto in turn supplies Charleston’s drinking water.

How old are the trees?

The sanctuary opened on just over 3,400 acres, and 1,783 of those acres had never been logged. That stand is the largest surviving block of virgin bald cypress and tupelo gum swamp forest anywhere, by Audubon’s account and most others. Dozens of the cypress are around a thousand years old and stand about 125 feet. One has been estimated at 1,500 years; a 2018 feature in South Carolina Living put another at about 1,600, calling it the second oldest of its species known.

The forest also holds the only known population of dwarf trillium in South Carolina.

Who was Francis Beidler, and why did he not cut it?

Francis Beidler was a Chicago lumberman who owned the Santee River Cypress Company and bought into the swamp in the 1890s as a business investment. By about 1905 he had stopped logging the land, by the Philanthropy Roundtable’s account, because getting logs out of the waterlogged ground did not pay. He died in 1924. His family held the land after him, kept it uncut, and spent years fighting off the federal government, which wanted it during the Roosevelt administration.

By the late 1960s, other lumbermen had cut most of the rest of the swamp. The Nature Conservancy and the National Audubon Society raised $1.5 million and bought the heart of it in 1969. Audubon named the forest for Beidler and has been buying land around it since 1977. The sanctuary is now over 16,000 acres under Audubon ownership by Audubon’s count, over 18,000 by Wikipedia’s, with several thousand more acres of neighboring land under conservation easement. The boardwalk went in in 1977 or 1978; sources differ by a year.

National Natural Landmark in 1979. National Recreation Trail in 1984. Important Bird Area in 2001. Ramsar Wetland of International Importance on May 30, 2008, the first Audubon sanctuary in the country to get that one.

Visiting the Francis Beidler Forest boardwalk

Address: 336 Sanctuary Road, Harleyville, SC 29448. Phone (843) 462-2150. It is off I-26 roughly an hour northwest of downtown Charleston, past Summerville and Ridgeville.

Hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day; call ahead on other holidays. The upland Grassland and Woodland trails are open dawn to dusk every day.

Admission: $12 for ages 13 and up, $7 for ages 6 to 12, free under 6. Free on the second Saturday of each month. A dollar off each ticket if you buy online at least 24 hours ahead, two dollars off for adult groups of twelve or more. Annual passes get unlimited boardwalk admission.

The walk: 1.75 miles, a loop, ADA accessible, starting and ending at the visitor center. Most people take an hour and a half to two hours. There are no restrooms on the boardwalk. No pets. An offshoot from the eleventh rest stop goes out to Goodson Lake, a still pool where you can usually see kingfishers and mudfish.

Other things to do: Spring canoe trips through the swamp from March through May, night walks, and bird walks on the first Saturday of the month. The grassland trail runs more than two miles across upland being restored to longleaf pine savanna.

What you will see

Prothonotary warblers, the yellow bird on the sanctuary’s signs, nest in tree cavities along the boardwalk from spring into summer. The forest counts about 140 bird species nesting or passing through, among them barred owls, Swainson’s warblers, yellow-crowned night-herons, and swallow-tailed kites. Alligators and water snakes keep to the channels. In high water the swamp floods the whole floor of the forest.

The people who were here before the boardwalk

Native people lived along the Edisto more than three thousand years ago. The state-recognized Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe, headquartered in Ridgeville, descends from the Kusso, who were here when Europeans arrived, and from a band of Natchez who came east from the Mississippi in the 1730s and were taken in. Their communities today sit along Four Holes Swamp and at Creeltown, and the swamp’s watershed takes in part of their tribal land. They took the name Edisto from the river in the 1970s.

The swamp also hid people. Enslaved men and women from the plantations along its edge ran into it and stayed, sometimes for weeks, sometimes longer. In 2020 the National Park Service added Four Holes Swamp to its Network to Freedom, and in 2023 Audubon put six signs along the boardwalk telling that part of the story. One man who hid here and got out wrote it down. His name was James Matthews, and his page is /james-matthews-four-holes-swamp-freedom-seekers/.

Hurricane Hugo came through in September 1989 and smashed long sections of the boardwalk, snapping pines and uprooting oaks. Audubon’s staff rebuilt it. One of them said afterward that a single storm changed the forest more than a thousand years of growing had.

The oldest tree in the swamp has stood through every hurricane on record and a good many that are not. It has not said which.

The county map on this site puts the swamp in its place between the Edisto and the railroad, and the history page follows the water from here down. The dispatches start in the river at /the-edisto-keeps-its-own/. See also /history/ and /map/.

Four Holes Swamp and the Francis Beidler Forest