Preserving An Ecosystem: The Big Thicket National Preserve (May 4, 2025)
by Scott Sosebee
It has taken a while, but humans are finally beginning to understand that our world is a precarious place and wanton destruction of our natural habitat does not just create an ugly eyesore, but it has the potential to alter the way we live, travel, work, and survive. It truly is symbiotic, and I applaud reasonable efforts that allow us to finally live in harmony with our surrounding environment. Our region has a prime example of the effort to carve out and preserve a natural environment—The Big Thicket National Preserve.
The current preserve is one of the last surviving examples of what was once a vast and unique ecosystem, ten distinct ecosystems to be more precise. It is a “meeting place” of flora and fauna from the Gulf Coastal Plains, the Eastern Forests, and the Central Plains. Species that in other places thrive hundreds of miles apart are in close proximity within this natural wonder. Bald cypress swamps exist just a small distance away from sandhills; towering pine forests grow almost in the same space as coastal and prairie grasses. A short walk through the many trails of the preserve will allow you to see creatures as diverse as roadrunners and alligators. It is truly an inimitable land.
The history of the Big Thicket goes back to “big time,” millions of years ago, when it was covered with water. As the waters receded and the land appeared, the Big Thicket rose between the Gulf of Mexico and the glaciers of the Ice Age. Through hundreds of thousands of years, the trees grew, and the grasses multiplied while they shared the land with prehistoric creatures such as mastodons and saber-tooth tigers. When the glaciers began to fade away, they deposited numerous different types of soil and vegetation, which created this unique landscape and environment. Some have called it the most biologically diverse region in the entire world.
Native American groups such as the Atakapas, Caddo, and Alabama-Coushatta moved through the Big Thicket, taking game and living on its edges. During the 1850s, American white settlers began to penetrate the Big Thicket, also generally living off the land as Native Americans had done for years. Some established subsistence farms, but the thin soil and thick vegetation of the Big Thicket were generally unsuited to large-scale farming. To some extent, the vastness and the sheer entanglement of the Big Thicket somewhat protected it from destruction, although overhunting did contribute to some loss of wildlife.
It would be the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that would begin to destroy what had existed for more than a millennium. Timber barons began to clear cut the large virgin forests of the area to capitalize on a rapidly growing and industrializing America. The discovery of oil at Sour Lake in 1901 brought the oil drillers and their metal derricks to the Big Thicket, and rail lines to transport all the extracted goods cut back the trees and destroyed the plant life even further. If not stopped, the Big Thicket, like its similar ecosystems to the east, would cease to exist.
Luckily for future generations, there were people who realized the folly of losing such a unique natural feature. R.E. Jackson founded and organized the East Texas Big Thicket Association in 1927 in a formal effort to save what was left of the Big Thicket. The Texas Agricultural Experiment Station conducted a thorough survey in 1936, which paved the way for more intense conservation efforts. Such endeavors faltered some during World War II and in the rush to push industrialization south and west after the war. Conservation efforts once again gained ground in the 1960s, but without governmental action, there was little those who hoped to save the Thicket could do.
The demand for a Big Thicket State Park took form under naturalist Lance Rosier and Liberty mayor Dempsie Henley when they founded the Big Thicket Association in 1964. Getting little satisfaction from state authorities, the group decided to push for national park status. Such an effort bore more fruit. Led by Senator Ralph Yarborough and Congressmen Charlie Wilson and Bob Eckhardt, Congress finally produced a bill in 1974 that established the Big Thicket National Preserve. President Gerald Ford signed the bill that created the first natural preserve under the auspices of the National Park System. In 1981, the United Nations recognized it as an International Biosphere Reserve.
The Big Thicket Preserve now consists of twelve units in parts of Hardin, Polk, Liberty, Jasper, and Tyler counties. Most of the preserve is off-limits to visitors, but it has an extensive trail system that allows hikers and casual walkers the chance to view nature at its best. You can visit the Visitor Center just off Highway 69 outside Kountze and enter the trail system at numerous points. A natural wonder preserved right here in East Texas.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.