Leaders want to make Macon’s Ocmulgee Mounds Georgia’s first national park. Is it possible?

Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock visited Macon on Monday to tour the Ocmulgee Mounds, guided by a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation who is helping lead the effort to get the preserve designated by Congress as a national park.

“After hiking the grounds and learning more about its history today, it is clear Ocmulgee is not just an expanse of land, it is a living testament to our intertwined histories and a source of economic and cultural vitality,” Warnock said at a press conference, flanked by local and state elected officials.

“To spend time on this land is to take seriously the complicated American story,” he said.

The event came days after the release of a study conducted by the National Park Service, which assessed an earlier plan for inclusion of a 50-mile river corridor between Macon and Hawkinsville into the national park system.

That study rendered a mixed verdict on the plan. It said the plan met the required qualifications for national significance and suitability for national parks, but that the area was not “feasible” for inclusion in the park system due to the difficulty of acquiring the land, and the fact that some of the assessed land was already under state management.

Tracie Revis, the Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative’s advocacy director, led the senator on a hike from the park’s Visitors Center to the Great Temple Mound.

Revis described the civilization that inhabited the prehistoric mounds as “the Atlanta of its day,” and connected the modern dispossession of its descendants to the history of plantation slavery.

She described how the park initiative has enabled her own homecoming to her people’s ancestral land from Oklahoma, where the Muscogee Creek Nation was displaced to in the 19th century by the U.S. government.

The area under consideration by the study was significantly larger than the area the park initiative is currently proposing.

Since the time the study was commissioned, the park initiative has removed the Oaky Woods Wildlife Management Area and its surrounding lands from inclusion in the proposed national park footprint.

U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop,D-2nd District, described the study as “the latest plateau in our climb to achieve a space that is appropriately designated and sized, given its significance.”

The study is merely a recommendation to Congress, which has the ultimate power to designate national parks.

Warnock said legislation to do so would be introduced “soon” but did not give more details.

Mayor Lester Miller told The Telegraph in an interview that now is the right time for the long-running efforts to establish a national park to come to fruition.

“We want this done in the 118th Congress because this is our 200th bicentennial celebration for Macon and Bibb County,” Miller said.

He also cited Macon’s recent “reconciliation” with Muscogee Creek Nation, whose flag was flown atop City Hall earlier this year, as a significant achievement for the park effort.