BRUNSWICK, GA. | Georgia announced it has acquired 19,500 acres straddling the Glynn-Wayne county line for $36 million — mostly from grants and donors — meaning the Altamaha River corridor is protected from development from the ocean to U.S. 84 at Jesup.

"It’s the last big piece on the Altamaha Corridor," said Jason Lee, who works in the Department of Natural Resources non-game section.

The state’s ownership of Sansavilla as a wildlife management area means that 165,000 acres are under state conservation and it turns what had been leased hunting land for 40 years into public lands.

About 10,000 acres of the land is high and sandy and was once prehistoric dunes running three to four miles deep along the south bank of the river. Its longleaf pine and wiregrass habitat is home to about 400 gopher tortoises and at least 10 indigo snakes, North America’s largest snakes, Lee said.

"They hunt and kill rattlesnakes," but are otherwise very docile, Lee said. "There used to be tons of them around here on these sand hills."

But because they are so docile — they don’t bite if picked up in the woods — they are prized by collectors and their numbers in the wild have been reduced, he said.

Not all of the land is high and dry.

Much of the rest is so called flat woods because it was former marshes inland from the dunes. The clay soils and poor drainage mean it cannot be developed densely, but those characteristics make it the best land for growing timber in the world, he said.

"That’s why mills are so close," he said.

DNR Commissioner Mark Williams, a native of Wayne County, said the state bought the property in phases from the Conservation Fund with the assistance of The Nature Conservancy.

The purchase was funded through donations from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, the Knobloch Family Foundation and grants from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service’s Forestry Legacy program. The state of Georgia issued bonds to fund its share of the purchase.

Also, the Department of Defense’s Environmental Protection Integration program and the Marine Corps bought a restricted use easement to buffer Townsend Bombing Range across the river in McIntosh County.

Because Marine Corps pilots and those from other branches of service are training with laser-guided bombs that are released from greater distances, the Corps needs a larger safety buffer around the range.

The interests don’t stop with wildlife and national defense.

Lee said Sansavilla has some historic sites going back centuries, starting with its name. Sansavilla is derived from Father Avila, a Spanish priest who was in the area downstream in the 1500s, Lee said. It is believed he was captured by Timucuan tribesmen and taken inland to a settlement on the bluff that now bears his name, Lee said.

"He must have endeared himself enough to be known as St. Avila," Lee said.

Sansavilla ultimately became important to British colonists. Mary Musgrove, who was half white, half Native American, had worked as a translator for Georgia’s founder, Gen. James Oglethorpe. In the 1730s, Oglethorpe built the fortified town, Fort Frederica, on St. Simons Island as a buffer to protect the colony of South Carolina from Spanish forces in St. Augustine.

Oglethorpe convinced Musgrove to build a trading post at Sansavilla, and archaeologists have found evidence of it and of a fort manned by a small garrison.

The state has other protected areas upstream on the Altamaha, most notably the Moody Forest in Appling County, but Lee said the next acquisitions will start at Sansavilla and head in opposite directions toward the Okefenokee Swamp and Fort Stewart, each of which have 400,000 acres under protection.

Fort Stewart’s longleaf pine forests are home to a lot of gopher tortoises and red-cockaded woodpeckers. The Okfenokee National Wildlife Refuge has the woodpeckers, gopher tortoises, alligators and a lot of scarce and endangered plants.

To make the connection to the Okefenokee, the state would start in the Waynesville area in eastern Brantley County, pick up the Satilla River and its swamps at a bend to the south and follow that toward the Okefenokee, Lee said. On the opposite side, the state would acquire land between the Townsend bombing range buffer in Long County to connect to Fort Stewart, he said.

With those future land acquisitions included, Lee said, "it would be about 2 million acres of protected and connected conservation land. That would take care of the habitat and the species along the coast."

He acknowledged there are a lot of dwellings scattered around the woods in eastern Brantley County but said, "there are pathways to do it."

For now, however, the DNR will concentrate on converting Sansavilla’s pine plantation land into a more natural habitat.

Lee complimented the former owners on their stewardship. "It’s been pines planted in rows. The wetlands are in good shape," he said.

The DNR will clear cut and thin what had been commercial pines and replace those with long leaf pines.

"You plant trees thick for survival, then thin in 10 years and 20 years. Then we burn," he said.

Prescribed burning suppresses competing growth and cuts down on the pests, especially ticks, he said.

Terry Dickson: (912) 264-0405