Before 1700, the Piedmont foothills of South Carolina formed a frontier landscape of ancient oak and hickory forest, scattered twenty- to thirty-acre Piedmont prairies, and canebrakes in the floodplains along streams and rivers. Native Americans used fire to maintain and expand the grasslands, limiting tree seedlings while encouraging grasses and herbaceous plants, with little long-term harm to mature trees, and they regularly relocated hunting camps throughout the foothills. This mix of deep forest, open grassland, and canebrakes supported bison, elk, whitetail deer, wolves, panthers, black bears, foxes, squirrels, turkey, and rabbits. After 1800, European settlers also used fire, but to clear land for farms and pastures, harvested the old-growth forest for building materials and firewood, and plowed the Piedmont prairies for crops. Bison, elk, black bears, wolves, and panthers were hunted into extinction in the region. With Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and industrialization, crop production spread across nearly all tillable land; from 1830 to 1860, cotton production in the southern U.S.A. rose from 720,000 to 5,000,000 bales, leaving little of the great forest and grasslands to support wildlife. By the 1930s, the park land had gone out of crop production and had begun to reforest with pine, sweetgum, and other fast-growing trees, and the transition toward mature hardwood forest is underway. Whitetail deer, turkey, squirrels, and river otters have returned to the Reedy River, while cowbirds and coyotes have migrated from the Midwest to the Southeast. The mature oak and hickory forest, extensive canebrakes, and grasslands are gone and will not return to their former scale, as indigenous plants now compete with exotic species such as Japanese privet, and the future landscape will be more diverse and ever changing.