Urban creek bears burden of development, gives gifts of beauty, fun

To your one side, the creek, milky brown and swift-flowing, energized by recent heavy rains. To your other, the swamp, shrouded in shade, partly carpeted by pine needles and soft, white sand deposited by earlier flooding.

Above you, a great blue heron splays its wings and squawks. Nearby, a family of deer flash little white tails. A turtle creeps from a sandbar into the water. A tiny toad plays it coy on a leaf by your foot.

The buzz of bugs drowns out the hum of Forest Drive traffic. And for a few moments, you forget you’ve come but a few hundred yards from one of the most popular commercial destinations in the Midlands.

Beside the Trenholm Plaza shopping center sits this improbably pristine wetland, one of the few nearly natural pieces of the Gills Creek watershed that envelops Columbia and its outskirts. An urban oasis.

But even here, every ounce of the creek bears the imprint of every action, every development, every human folly from upstream and higher ground. And in turn, we have borne the brunt of its swells.

“You’ve got to respect the water – and that water will get you if you don’t,” said Carol Kososki, an environmental activist who lives with her husband, John, on Forest Lake. Kososki grew up along the Mississippi River and “learned at an early age you better pay attention to what the water is doing.”

“People don’t understand it’s not just some nice pretty land here,” she said. “You have to look at how the water affects it.”

Water woven into city

The central segment of Gills Creek, stretching from Forest Lake roughly to Rosewood Drive, flows through charming lakeside neighborhoods, heavily trafficked business corridors and a few seemingly incongruous pockets of untouched wetlands.

Gills Creek attracted early development in the area and, in fact, laid the very foundation for some of it: Bedrock from the creek’s channel was used in some early buildings and can be found in some old tombstones, said Margaret Dunlap, a Richland Library local historian whose father’s family was influential in developing along parts of the creek.

It started with a grain- turned cotton mill, below what is now Forest Lake. Then came another, a saw mill. After a few decades, along came the Army’s Camp Jackson, which not only drained the 200-acre Gills Creek Swamp and channelized about four miles of the creek, but also once ran a pipe from Forest Lake for the fort’s water supply.

With the passing decades came more homes and more businesses, with the creek as the overlooked center of a bustling city.

Along its heavily developed middle section, Gills Creek is neighbor to locally loved mom-and-pop stores such as Forest Lake Gardens and Forest Lake Fabrics, washed away by the October flood but since revived, or nearly so, in their original locations.

It runs beside highly sought-after national chain stores and unique boutiques at Trenholm Plaza, spared thanks to nearby wetlands that absorbed the creek’s wrath during the flood.

Before upstream waters rushed and gushed into the swampy sponge below Forest Drive in the aftermath of October’s rains, the creek poured in torrents over the Forest Lake dam, which was fortunately fortified by the Army Corps of Engineers about 25 years ago.

The Forest Lake dam was one of the few in the watershed that held during the floods.

‘A wonderful place to grow up’

For more than a century, Forest Lake – earlier known as Dent’s Pond – has been a recreational hotspot for Columbia-area residents, who once rode trolleys from downtown to visit the Lake View park.

The first piece of the creek to be altered by a dam, Forest Lake became the place to swim, camp and play as early as 1912.

The concrete remnants of a swimming pool are still visible just below the dam.

In Edwin Cooper Jr.’s lakeside yard today, a wooden pole covered in leafy vines is what’s left of an old rope swing from the Lake View days.

Cooper’s family, starting with his great-uncle, John Hughes Cooper, has been behind much of the residential development in the Forest Lake area.

Lakeside living meant swimming in the lake and exploring the creek for Cooper’s son and daughter, Dunlap, the historian, whose own children can hardly resist jumping in on a hot summer’s day. Cooper used to love to water ski on the lake, he said, though Dunlap and her kids never really got into it.

“It was a wonderful place to grow up,” said Dunlap, whose family now lives in her childhood home, beside her father’s house on the lake. “I feel like it’s a little oasis close to an urban area.”

Access to Forest Lake is mostly exclusive today, restricted to lakeside residents and country club members. But it has kept its beautiful and playful function.

Sediment buildup and trash in the bottom of the lake make water skiing a little risky these days, particularly since the flood, but it’s not unusual to see boats with skiers skim across the water.

Some evenings, neighbors get together for cocktail cruises, looping around lake islands where bald eagles and great blue herons come to nest.

Uneven give-and-take

Look how Gills Creek, hidden in our urban midst, has served us.

And look how we have served it.

Where it flows further south, through the bustling big-box corridor near the intersection of lower Devine Street and Rosewood Drive, the creek has been relegated to deep, straight, unnatural channels from which it escaped and ravaged its surroundings.

The creek runs past the new Rosewood Crossing shopping center, past Midlands Technical College and near Columbia’s downtown airport.

“We drive over it every day on our way to work. I’d say hundreds of thousands of people drive over it or drive right next to it and probably don’t even know about it,” said Erich Miarka, director of the Gills Creek Watershed Association. Here, he said, “Gills Creek is not much of a community asset. When we see the creek in the areas around Devine Street and Garners Ferry and Rosewood, it’s more of a nuisance at this point, I’d say.”

In some areas, Gills Creek certainly looks the part of a nuisance, though by no fault of its own. Plastic shopping bags are strewn like confetti in the brush and branches along its banks. Huge metal dumpsters are lodged indefinitely in its banks. Collections of soda bottles and beer cans pepper the ground.

This was never meant to be the character of the creek.

Nor does the creek belong in deep, artificial ditches – bottlenecked – covered and bordered by concrete and asphalt, partly above ground and partly beneath it, Miarka said.

It was meant to meander and, yes, to flood.

This story was originally published September 9, 2016 at 4:17 PM with the headline "Urban creek bears burden of development, gives gifts of beauty, fun."