About

Natural Beauty and Diversity

Cypress Pond Park is composed of the 260-acre Cypress Pond area, which flows through Cypress Creek into the Alabama River at a point known as Cypress Inlet immediately upriver from the city’s Riverwalk.  It encompasses (1) Cypress Inlet on the Alabama River, (2) Cypress Creek, which runs approximately 1.5 miles up to the (3) Cypress Pond Area, approximately 260 acres east of Lower Wetumpka Road and north of Oakwood Cemetery.

The park site is unusual in that it is a large tract of undeveloped land located in close proximity to a downtown business district. The location abounds with landscape diversity, providing scenic views of the City of Montgomery from high bluffs that overlook slopes with three ancient ravines carved by the forces of nature.  The landscape also features beautiful swampland in the lower regions of the park site.

Diversity exists not only in the landscape, but also in the plants and animals living in the area. To date, more than 100 species of birds, 60 species of trees, and 30 flowering plants, as well as numerous ferns, vines, mushrooms, and, of course, insects have been identified in Cypress Pond Park.

Once complete, Cypress Pond Park will provide Montgomery, Alabama, with an outdoor environmental education facility and new outdoor recreational opportunities while promoting the conservation and preservation of natural resources.  The park will also support the continued economic revitalization of downtown Montgomery by promoting eco-tourism.

Past, Present, and Future

Almost two hundred years ago, thousands of settlers flooded into what is now Alabama; they were driven here by Alabama Fever, the belief that by growing cotton they could strike it rich overnight.  Later in the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs would begin to exploit the state’s abundant forests and its mineral belt, again in the expectation that they could strike it rich. The results were, however, “a rich state, a poor people.”

Alabamians have come to realize that a prosperous state and a healthy people depend on a diversified economy: agriculture, forestry, mining, manufacturing and industry, commerce, transportation, banking and insurance, government, education, technology and medicine, the arts, recreation, and historical tourism.

Increasingly, Alabamians are hearing about separate, grassroots efforts to use the state’s natural resources in a way that will be beneficial to all the people. After all, the Great Seal of the State of Alabama features the state’s rivers superimposed on an outline of the state. There is a twist however, as the rivers no longer represent the means by which cotton was taken to market.

Today, visionary Alabamians realize that the state’s natural environment can be the basis of a new economic component: eco-tourism in its broadest sense. It appeals to environmentalists and conservationists, and to those who seek a sort of spiritual renewal offered by the wild environment.  It appeals to those at one extreme who only want to watch and listen and contemplate, and at the other extreme to those who want active, physically-challenging recreation.

To date, a feasibility study funded by the Kodak Foundation and the City of Montgomery has been completed.  $100,000 has been allocated to the City by the U. S. Congress to be administered by the Federal Corp. of Engineers.  The City also received a $20,000 donation from a local foundation in early 2010.

One day, Cypress Pond Park will offer a wild place only 1.25 miles from the state’s Capitol building.   Cypress Inlet, which will be one of the park’s pedestrian entrances, is immediately upriver from the Riverwalk’s amphitheater. The juxtaposition of a developed urban park to a wild area will be unusual, if not unique.  After Cypress Inlet is repurposed, the inlet that once was the site of a Confederate shipyard, will provide access to Cypress Creek.  First, however, access must be provided through the double-track railway embankment, which, incidentally, entombs the old single-track railway trestle.  Shielded by trees and shrubbery from the largely-deserted old industrial area, a footpath will follow Cypress Creek to Cypress Pond and the bluffs and ravines that partially surround it.  Eventually, a raised boardwalk should traverse the pond itself, opening its flora and fauna to the curious out for a walk, to those who would rather exercise in natural beauty rather than in a gym, to school children, to college students, and to amateur and serious naturalists.

The plan for Montgomery’s Riverwalk, which includes the Cypress Inlet, is shown here.  Click the picture for a larger view.

The Montgomery Tree Committee conceived Cypress Pond Park.  People who plant trees are the ultimate optimists; they know they are unlikely to live to enjoy the fruit of their labor.  Yet they do enjoy knowing that future generations will have a beautiful, healthy natural environment to enjoy.  So, eventually, Cypress Pond Park will not be located just upriver from today’s Riverwalk, but, as envisioned, it will be the wild component on an expanded Montgomery Riverwalk  that will eventually stretch from Maxwell Air Force Base and air museum to the Northern Boulevard and to an improved yacht basin.

To learn more about Cypress Pond Park, and to view several photos, Please read Cypress Pond: Valuable Habitat in an Urban Wetland, by Christopher Anderson, Assistant Professor, Auburn University School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences.

Cypress Pond Park is a project of The Montgomery Tree Committee, in cooperation with the City of Montgomery.