FLORENCE — Maria Whitehead said there was something special about being raised in the Back Swamp Community outside of Florence. A childhood in Back Swamp meant growing up on her family’s 200-year-old farm, running through grassy fields, swimming in rivers and having pets like snakes, frogs and great horned owls. The land in Back Swamp was Whitehead’s introduction to the beauty of land and the sense of place it gives a person.
It was there that she’d ride on a zipline crafted by her mother who encouraged time outdoors, and there where she and her three brothers would fall in love with the land of the Pee Dee. What people need most to cultivate that love and passion for the land, Whitehead said, is access to it. Protecting land that becomes accessible to communities and to the public is at the heart of what Whitehead does in her role as senior vice president and director of land for the southeast at Open Space Institute.
Whitehead is a recipient of the 2024 Honorable Cornelius Amory Pugsley Medal from the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration, the most prestigious award for contributions to the development of public parks and conservation. In her eight years with the Open Space Institute, Whitehead has helped protect more than 75,000 acres not just in South Carolina but all across the Southeast. Her reach has spanned from the Santee Delta to Myrtle Beach to Twiggs and Bibbs counties in central Georgia .
Whitehead championed the effort to create South C.
