This thesis will examine the way the proponents, opponents, and park studies understood and discussed the history and cultural resources of the Congaree Swamp. During the early advocacy of the 1960s and through the planning for the 1988 boundary expansion, proponents of creating a preserve characterized history as distant and having little physical impact on their natural wilderness landscape. Opponents alternatively focused on land uses of hunting, fishing, and logging that, while historic, had also continued through that point in time. For them, creating a preserve landscape would change the landscape they knew through those activities. Studies undertaken by the National Park Service combined the requirements of cultural resource management legislation with the knowledge of park advocates. As time passed, Congaree Swamp National Monument (later Congaree National Park) increasingly has devoted more time and resources to the historical subjects brought up by those who had opposed the park. At present, and into the future, the park has the opportunity to look at the Swamp's past in an interdisciplinary way, as an environmental history of both cultural and natural resources.