Ocmulgee Mounds, a site in central Georgia with 12,000 years of Indigenous history, may be on the verge of becoming the newest U.S. national park. This is the flagship designation of the National Park Service system, which includes many types of properties in addition to formally designated national parks.
The National Park Service has managed the site since the 1930s, first as a national monument and since 2019 as a national historical park. There are no legal or practical differences in protection between these redesignations, though the branding and marketing of the site may change.
As a geographer who studies parks and the naming of places, Ph.D. candidate Seth Kannarr has seen that when a National Park Service unit is redesignated a national park, as a pending bill in Congress currently proposes for Ocmulgee Mounds, it does not typically change the funding available to run the site. That’s especially true at a time when National Park Service funding and personnel are being cut. However, a park redesignation does serve political purposes and affects how visitors perceive the park. Read more at The Conversation.
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