MACON, Ga. — Macon's beloved Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic park may soon quadruple in size.
A group of people hope to expand the park and turn it into the first National Park and Preserve east of the Mississippi River.
"There's one city in the entire United States that has a national park in it," Chris Sheridan said.
Chris Sheridan and Seth Clark joined the Ocmulgee National Park and Preserve Initiative team to make Macon, the second city in the United States with a national park.
"This land is sacred. This is home. It raised my grandparents' family, and it raised a whole lot of people -- 17,000 years worth of people," Seth Clark said.
Seth Clark, Macon-Bibb's Mayor pro tem, will become the group's executive director for the project's phase three, creating Georgia's first national park and preserve.
"This is going to be a unique opportunity to take advantage of, something that you just aren't going to find any place else," Sheridan said.
Sheridan will become the group's chairman.
Both Sheridan and Clark have special connections to the park and believe it is a place that all Georgians should benefit from.
"I used to walk down to the river and just enjoyed it -- picked blackberries, shoot squirrels -- I've been coming here all of my life." Sheridan said.
"My granddaddy taught me how to fish on this river, and now I will work to preserve it for my son until I can't anymore," Clark said.
Supporters of this project want to expand the national historic park in east Macon down the Ocmulgee River Corridor as far as Hawkinsville.
Historians say the land has been occupied by humans for 17,000 years and became the homeland of the Muscogee tribe of Native Americans.
"We need to do this for the economic side of things, but we also have to do it because it is an act of endowment that is well overdue." Clark said.
Clark and Sheridan say they have to raise $1.2 million by August for this park to be recognized as a national park. They say that money will go to land acquisition.
According to Clark and Sheridan's group, if the current 700-acre site is expanded and turned into a National Park and Preserve, the annual number of visitors in Macon would increase by more than a million.