Georgia woman’s plan for nation’s longest paved trail pushes forward

How do you begin a journey of 211 miles, taking the first step toward creating what might become the longest paved recreational trail in the United States?

For one Georgia woman, it starts with a 1.5 mile dirt path.

Saturday, Mary Charles Howard will gather with others to celebrate the modest beginning of an audacious undertaking. As she envisions it, the Georgia Hi-Lo Trail will ultimately connect North Georgia to Savannah and the coast, dipping into small towns all along the way. A race for runners and a bicycle ride are part of the day’s planned festivities to mark the groundbreaking in Howard’s hometown of Sandersville.

Howard, a landscape architect, came up with the idea for the trail and has spent more than five years trying to build support for it, a journey which The Atlanta Journal-Constitution detailed in a story last year. Howard is the unpaid executive director of the trail’s nonprofit organization.

For the first segment, a property owner granted free access to long-held family land. A heavy-duty mulcher was donated by one of the nonprofit’s board members. It was used to cut through briar patches, invasive privets and loblolly pine saplings in a larger stand of hardwood trees on the edge of Sandersville in central Georgia.

The cleared 1.5-mile stretch is expected to remain unpaved until more money comes in.

Yet Howard sees the beginning as a hopeful sign after a setback earlier this year. In the late winter, a property owner who had agreed to provide free access for a nearby section of the trail backed out unexpectedly, she said.

“That put us in a dead stop. I was feeling brokenhearted and feeling sorry for myself for a couple months,” she said.

Then she rallied, seeing it as another hurdle to overcome. She’s now working with a new landowner nearby.

“If we are ever going to get this dang thing open, why not now, instead of trying to get everything perfect? Kind of like having a kid: If you ever try to wait to have everything perfect, you are never going to have one.”

On Saturday, the dirt trail will be accessible for walks, but won’t be regularly open for public access until perhaps early February, Howard said. By then she hopes to have a couple trailheads, parking areas and more signs in place.

That, she hopes, will generate more interest and help raise more private and local government donations, which, in turn, could lead to state and federal grants that can fund most of the path construction, including paving. Howard had planned to apply for such grants last fall but held off when stretched county governments couldn’t provide the needed matching dollars.

She also has reached out to Atlanta-based Norfolk Southern and asked to put the trail on part of the railroad giant’s property near Sandersville and the neighboring city of Tennille.

Closer to the state’s coast, Effingham County has set aside about $1.3 million from local sales tax dollars to contribute toward building some of the Hi-Lo. The county hopes to use a portion of an abandoned railway bed now owned by Georgia Power.

Part of the trail’s envisioned 26-mile stretch through Effingham would knit together the center of a small town, two elementary schools and four parks, county manager Tim Callanan said. “We anticipate it will get a lot of use.”

Two years ago, when the county surveyed residents about park and recreation desires, officials thought the top demand would be for new soccer fields and improved baseball facilities, Callanan said. “But the No. 1 item on that list was walking trails. It really opened our eyes to what people wanted.”

Howard contends the trail’s benefits will extend well beyond recreation for residents of every age and physical ability. She sees the Hi-Lo as an avenue to boost civic esteem, bring people and families together, funnel visitors to nearby businesses, offer options for cleaner travel and bolster small towns and rural areas, many of which have seen young people move away.

Still, the idea of the Hi-Lo has raised concerns in some communities. Some residents don’t believe organizers’ promise that people won’t be forced to sell their land for the project. Others worry a trail will attract crime. But the biggest hurdle may be costs. Even if federal and state dollars fund most of the construction, some worry about how stretched local governments could come up with funding matches and cover trail maintenance costs, even with volunteers ready to help out and some locals deeply in support of the project.

Last November, the county commissioners in Emanuel County unanimously passed a resolution specifically opposing the Hi-Lo trail in the community, which is a key section at the center of the proposed project. That raises the question of whether the route might shift elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Howard has been moving forward with communities that have been more receptive. She largely set aside her landscape architecture business to concentrate on the Hi-Lo, even as she and her husband wrestle with the duties of raising three young children. Recently, she was out identifying and marking key trees and woody bushes along a stretch of the planned trail, with hopes that the project will ultimately be considered the largest arboretum in the nation.

The trail itself, if built in its entirety, would be far longer than two well-known paved trails in Georgia: the Atlanta Beltline and the Silver Comet Trail.

The Hi-Lo’s northern terminus is proposed for Union Point in Greene County, where the path could connect with the separate Firefly Trail, another project underway that leads to Athens. Howard has said the entire Hi-Lo could take a dozen years to complete.

The Hi-Lo’s modest launch as an initial dirt path through the woods in Washington County isn’t surprising to Effingham’s Callanan. “A lot of these large projects, that is how they have to get started. .... They start with a vision and a visionary — that’s Mary Charles Howard — who will keep pushing this.”

He added, “Is it a goal that will be difficult to reach? Absolutely. Can it be done? I think so.”

More information about the Hi-Lo groundbreaking and related race and bicycle event on July 27 is available at: https://georgiahilo.org/race/

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