The South Carolina Lowcountry has always been defined by contrasts—wide tidal rivers and narrow creeks, upland pines and windbent spartina, the sweetness of freshwater mixing with coarse salt. But in recent decades, the region’s sharpest contrast has centered on the purpose of its natural landscapes, seen in the divide between conservation and development. Few places illustrate that divergence more clearly than Clarendon Farms.
The Cox family has cared for Clarendon Farms for decades. It’s the kind of place that asks you to slow down, listen closely, and remember what truly matters. At daybreak, boisterous wood ducks fill the creeks, the whistles of bobwhites carry through the pine uplands, and the smell of saltwater drifts off the marsh.
That relationship with the land matters, because Clarendon Farms was once eligible for major residential and commercial development—the kind of highly profitable, amenity-driven buildout that has transformed long stretches of the Atlantic Coast. But instead of developing this historic 5,600-acre property, on March 10, 2026, Cox Enterprises and the Cox family protected it in perpetuity through a donated conservation easement with Ducks Unlimited and Wetlands America Trust. The donation is valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars—among the most significant in US history.
“The most important thing we can do for the world is protect wild and natural places,” said Alex Taylor, chairman and CEO of Cox Enterprises. “Clarendon is a treasure, and we’re excited to know that it will be protected and undeveloped so future generations can see it and enjoy it as we have been doing for decades.”
The landmark 4,400-acre easement builds on previous work at Clarendon Farms, bringing the total acreage under protection here to more than 5,600 acres. Together, those lands reinforce a crucial conservation corridor spanning more than 20,000 acres. They also link the ACE Basin—where the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto rivers spill into St. Helena Sound—to the Savannah River, preserving one of the most ecologically important connected landscapes on the East Coast.
“Our family has always believed that it is important to protect wildlife and their habitats,” said Jim Kennedy, chairman emeritus of Cox Enterprises and chairman of the James M. Cox Foundation. “We have worked with Ducks Unlimited for many years and are proud to partner with them again. They have the expertise to ensure Clarendon remains a protected part of the Lowcountry and benefits the environment for years to come.”
To fully understand the importance of protecting this place, you have to step back in time. The ACE Basin remains one of the largest undeveloped estuaries along the Atlantic Flyway, a distinction that makes it exceptionally valuable for waterfowl. It is also where Ducks Unlimited’s conservation easement program took root, setting a national standard that has been replicated across North America.
By the late 1980s, accelerating growth from Charleston to Hilton Head made the ACE Basin a target for large-scale development. In response, a select group of private landowners joined with DU, the Nature Conservancy, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to form the ACE Basin Task Force, a public-private partnership focused on protecting the basin’s natural landscapes while keeping its traditional uses—including rice farming, forestry, hunting, and fishing—on the landscape.
Private landowners like the Cox family have always been the linchpin of successful conservation in the region. Lifelong resident and ACE Basin Task Force leader Charles Lane helped protect the historic Willtown Plantation—then owned by his late father—through one of the first easements in the region. Lane has since helped guide private land conservation efforts across the basin.
“We realized early on that if we didn’t protect this land ourselves, it wouldn’t stay the way we knew it,” Lane said. “The marshes, the rivers, the ducks—this whole landscape—it is all tied together.”
The work was personal and often urgent. Coy Johnston—a former DU regional director and land protection specialist at Wetlands America Trust—remembers how close the ACE came to complete development. When asked why he kept pushing, Johnston, who has hunted and fished the area his whole life, never complicated his answer. “I loved the little country. I grew up there. And I didn’t want to see it destroyed. It’s purely about the love of the land,” he said.
Those first Lowcountry easements have compounded in the last several decades. Today, more than 350,000 acres across the region are permanently protected, with Clarendon Farms standing as the latest and perhaps greatest expression of that legacy.
“By choosing permanent protection, the Cox family and Cox Enterprises ensured Clarendon Farms will continue to serve a purpose far beyond today,” explained Steve Maritz, chairman of Wetlands America Trust. “That commitment is central to how Wetlands America Trust safeguards landscapes like this for the future of waterfowl, wildlife, and people.”
Ducks Unlimited and its partners have long viewed the ACE Basin as one of the Atlantic Flyway’s most important wintering and migration landscapes for waterfowl precisely because it still functions like a single, intact system. That habitat continuity didn’t appear by accident. By the end of the 17th century, South Carolina became the nation’s first—and for generations its dominant—producer of rice. Built on a tidal system of dikes, trunks, and impoundments that were designed, engineered, and maintained by enslaved West African laborers, rice agriculture shaped the Lowcountry landscape forever. The rice fields provided abundant food for wintering and migrating ducks and geese, and when rice cultivation collapsed after the Civil War, many of those managed impoundments remained, maintained by landowners and sportsmen for waterfowl and other wildlife. Today, that land stewardship and legacy persists across the 350,000-acre ACE Basin watershed, one of the largest undeveloped wetland ecosystems on the Atlantic Coast.
“The permanent protection of Clarendon Farms carries the Lowcountry’s long tradition of land stewardship forward in a powerful and enduring way,” said Dr. Karen Waldrop, Ducks Unlimited’s chief conservation officer. “The easement locks in habitat connectivity across tens of thousands of acres, safeguarding an intact system that sustains waterfowl and other wildlife.”
That means food, refuge, and unbroken migration corridors for American green-winged and blue-winged teal, wood ducks, northern pintails, gadwalls, American black ducks, American wigeon, ring-necked ducks, mottled ducks—and dozens of other migratory bird species.
“The Clarendon Farms easement represents the very best of conservation in America,” said Adam Putnam, CEO of Ducks Unlimited. “The Cox family chose stewardship over development at a moment when the Lowcountry’s natural resources are under intense pressure. Their leadership will benefit waterfowl, wildlife, and people for generations and will stand as one of the most impactful conservation decisions ever made in this region or any other region of the United States. This single easement strengthens an entire network of protected lands, improves water quality, supports climate resilience, and advances long-standing priorities shared by our federal, state, and nonprofit partners. The scale of impact is extraordinary.”
That impact is measured not just in acres, but in the ecological significance of the habitat secured at Clarendon Farms. The historic rice fields, more than 40 miles of river and marsh frontage, nine islands and several hammock islands, plus nearly 1,300 acres of upland longleaf pine support a rich web of life—from bobwhite quail, wild turkeys, and white-tailed deer to wading birds and migratory songbirds. The same marshes that support vast flocks of ducks are also the nurseries that sustain a coast-wide fishery and shellfish economy—redfish nosing through green spartina on a low tide; shrimp and blue crabs rearing in brackish backwaters; oystermen on the flats; shrimpers working the rivers; fishing guides poling skiffs across the shallow flats. The vast wetlands also deliver public benefits—filtering water, storing floodwaters during storms, and buffering coastal communities as severe weather events intensify.
But out beyond the quiet of the water there are the sounds of another rising tide. The nearby Charleston metro area is adding more than 40 new residents a day, growing at roughly three times the national average, and that growth is spilling into surrounding counties like Beaufort, where Clarendon Farms lies. In a crowded flyway where development squeezes the coast first, keeping the pieces of habitat intact and connected—river to marsh to upland—matters just as much as counting acres.
In that light, this landscape is more than a large green shape on a map. It is working natural infrastructure—for waterfowl, for wildlife, and for the people who live downriver. At a moment when the value of habitat conservation is increasingly tested by development, the Cox family has joined a long tradition of private landowners who have pushed back the tide and in doing so have added their own chapter to this remarkable conservation story. With Ducks Unlimited and Wetlands America Trust stewarding that commitment, Clarendon Farms is secured, strengthening a tradition—and a legacy—that will endure for generations.
