Unique Places to Save

Near Blanch, NC, 40 acres of former grazed forest now stand protected in the Roanoke River Basin. Riverbend Hoss has been in our care since 2017. uniqueplacestosave.org/news/riverbe...

Now that the dam is out, here's what Ramseur's town clerk wants next: "I'd love to see tubing on the river. You could put in a tube at Ramseur and go all the way to Coleridge." Also on the list: fish moving upstream for the first time in a century.

Follow a raindrop. It lands on a ridge, trickles to a creek, joins a river, rests in a reservoir, and flows to your tap. Every step happens on land. Protect the land, and you protect the whole journey.

In the San Bernard watershed on the Texas coast, 57 acres at Hitchcock Creek are restoring streams and 14 acres of wetlands in Galveston County. Protected forever. uniqueplacestosave.org/news/hitchco...

Hampton and Carol love the same river for different reasons. He loves it because nature has value simply by existing. She loves it because it is the thread holding a town together. Conservation needs both. Ecology alone doesn't hold a project up. Neither does nostalgia.

A healthy creek tells on itself. Mayflies, caddisflies, salamanders, and little fish called darters only live where the water is clean. Find them, and you have found a watershed that is working. Bluesky reply (secondary post in thread): Curious where we work?

41.6 acres of restored stream corridor in Buncombe County, NC, protected forever in the French Broad River Basin. uniqueplacestosave.org/news/dead-oa... Bluesky reply (secondary post in thread): Mountain streams like Dead Oak stay healthy thanks to monthly donors.

A few more from the day the Ramseur trail opened. The thing that struck us: nobody there was treating it as a ceremony for a quarter mile of path. They were treating it as the river coming back.

A wetland upstream slows a flood before it reaches a town. A forest upstream filters water before it fills a reservoir. Downstream gets the benefit of what upstream protects. That is watershed thinking.

Once a degraded landscape, now 78 acres of restored streams and wetlands in Anson County, NC. Four Hills shows what patient restoration can do. uniqueplacestosave.org/news/four-hi...

This landscape has more than one story to tell. 🌿 Adjacent to Grantham Branch, the 370+ acre Falling Creek conservation easement adds another major piece to a connected conservation landscape in Wayne County.

When we say protected forever, we mean it legally. A conservation easement is a permanent agreement that stays with the land through every future owner. The creek is safe not just now, but for good.

61 acres in Catawba County, NC protected forever. Dogtown's restored streams feed clean water to the Catawba River Basin. uniqueplacestosave.org/news/dogtown...

The Ramseur dam was built in the early 1900s, largely of river rock, to power a sawmill and later a manufacturing plant. It hasn't made power in a long time. Its gates broke. It seeped. It sat there splitting the Deep River in two for more than a century. It's out now.

It’s hard to believe these were once corn and soybean fields. 🌱 The transformation goes far beyond what we can see. Restored stream channels and floodplains are helping reduce erosion and runoff, slow high water, and keep wetlands hydrated, all while creating healthier habitat.

Turn on your tap. That water started as rain on land upstream, gathered into a creek, a river, a reservoir. The health of that land is the health of your water. Protecting it upstream is the most cost effective filter there is.

76 acres along Deep Creek in Perquimans County, NC, restoring the small waterways that feed the Pasquotank. 17 acres of wetlands, protected forever. uniqueplacestosave.org/news/white-h...

The dye came out of the mills so thick you could see it. "We used to throw a log in the river to break up that dye," Ramseur's mayor told us. "It would be that thick. About two to three inches." He grew up swimming in that. He never stopped loving the river.

Stand on a ridge and pour out a glass of water. Some runs one way, some the other. That ridge is a divide. It decides which river your rain joins. Divides are borders of every watershed.

In the headwaters of Daddys Creek on the Cumberland Plateau, 31 acres of restored streams and wetlands stand protected at High Hood in Tennessee. uniqueplacestosave.org/news/high-ho...

Carol Akers' grandparents brought her father to Ramseur to work the cotton mill. Five of them lived in one company house. They walked across the bridge every morning. They owed the company store, like everybody did, and were paid in script instead of money.

You have a street address. You also have a watershed address: your creek, your river, your river's family. It is the address your water uses. Most people never learn it. This year, you will.

41 acres of wetlands among 56 protected acres in McCreary County, KY. Marsh Creek is one of our quiet giants, keeping headwater country clean in southern Kentucky. Become a Wetland Keeper: giving.uniqueplacestosave.org/page/wetland...

Ramseur's mayor is 81 years old and calls himself a river rat. As a boy, Hampton Spivey slept on the banks of the Deep River two or three weekends a month. No sleeping bags. Just an old blanket. "I woke up out there one time covered in snow."