Excerpts from Southern Living, by Dianne Young, July 1994
Ten years after she and her husband moved from North Carolina, Maggi Hall discovered Wildlife Action and the Little Pee Dee River Project. Activists to the core, Maggi and her husband Ron, had spent six years in the Research Triangle working to preserve the Eno River. “When we moved to Florence SC in 1973, there wasn’t anything to preserve,” she remembers, laughing at herself. “I was depressed because there was nothing going on.” Then in 1984, she heard about Wildlife Action. “Things fell in into place,” she concludes. “they were perfect.” Maggi went on to almost singlehandedly halt construction of a superhighway that would have slashed its way across the river. And today she organizes and teaches ecology classes for schoolchildren at the Resource Education Center that WLA opened just last year on the banks of the Little Pee Dee. (It was Maggi’s idea to contact log cabin companies and see if they’d donate a cabin to the project. A company donated the cost of half of the project and volunteers erected the two-story cabin.”
“To me, the Little Pee Dee is serenity,” Maggi answers softly. “It’s just so peaceful.” She gazes up at the tall, straight cypresses that almost wall off the stream and the blue vault of sky overhead. “I call it nature’s cathedral. That’s really what it is.”
The organization received scores of local, state, and national awards for their preservation of the Little Pee, but they know the battle goes on. “You save a river,” observes Maggi, “but it’s never completely safe—ever.” They know that last year’s upgrading of the Little Pee Dee to one of the Outstanding Resource Waters will be a help; it already has been, but more is needed.
In actuality, the article hadn’t the space to expand the extent of the story. After Maggi became Director of the Marion County Museum, the museum was given a canoe. What does one do with a canoe? She called the president of Wildlife Action with a scheme to begin canoe trips on the Little Pee Dee to bring awareness to the value of preserving it – the same project she and her husband had done on the Eno. She volunteered Ron as Chair. His job was to acquire six canoes and lead trips. He jumped at it. Ron, on his own, sought donations. Once he had a trailer and the canoes the adventure began. While Maggi ran the museum and was executive secretary of Wildlife Action, Ron was politicking in Columbia with the timber industry encouraging them not to timber to the water’s edge. He was successful with his request.
Both Halls were effective in this joint endeavor. In 1988 they were featured in a Public TV documentary Conserving America: The Rivers, funded by WQED and The Richard King Mellon Foundation. Three other rivers across the US were featured as well with Burgess Meredith moderating. The video is still available and the documentary airs periodically on TV and is shown in science classrooms. The Halls brought their experience to the Pee Dee and were successful in getting it designated as a South Carolina State Scenic River.
Maggi was also featured in a TV documentary When A Tree Falls – Decade Films, NY, for halting the 1-20 Connector across the Little Pee Dee River. The highway would have originated in Columbia and end at Myrtle Beach. Both Hall received local and state recognition for their environmental endeavors.
In 1991 Hall received the “Richard Watkins Conservation Award” from the Sierra Club, saved thousands of acres of wetlands by halting an I-20 Connector from Columbia to Myrtle Beach SC and the local “Woodmen of the World Environmental Award.” For her continued work in establishing the second environmental education center in South Carolina Hall’s organization was honored for her work in 1993 with the national “Conservation Citizenship Award” from the Chevron Corporation; in 1994 she received the National “Environmental Woman of Action” for South Carolina from the Wilderness Society. In 1995 she received the “Education Conservationist Award” for the environmental education center from the SC Wildlife Federation.