National Park Service Director Fran Mainella (second from left) poses with staff at the Cowpens National Battlefield on Monday. Mainella was on hand to congratulate the park rangers and local volunteers for successfully reshaping the landscape of the park to match what it might have looked like in the 1780s.

It has been over 200 years since the American victory at “The Cowpens,” but on Monday the director of the National Park Service was there to celebrate once more.

Fran Mainella was on hand to congratulate Cowpens Battlefield Park Director Farrell Saunders and his staff on their work in combining two ambitious landscaping projects.

“Here at this great battlefield, I feel a particular connection toward the revolution,” Mainella said during brief remarks to a small crowd. “My ancestors fought in the war in Connecticut so I have always studied it as best I could.”

Mainella cited the two projects completed by the Cowpens staff and teams of volunteers as impressive and necessary for the continued success of the battlefield. In the wake of devastating fires in Yellowstone National Park and other areas of the west, Congress mandated a reduction in heavy fuels at all of the locations in the National Park System. This meant that each park was to eliminate certain kinds of hardwoods, dead plants and underbrush from their properties. At the same time, a local group of volunteers had begun working with Cowpens to return the land to its original condition from the 1780s, when the battle was fought.

Because both tasks involved clearing land and plant growth management, the staff at Cowpens decided to combine them into one large scale project.

A Congressional mandate in 1970 required that the landscape be restored to that which existed in Colonial times in order to better interpret the conditions and events of this noteworthy battle. Decades of fire exclusion had led to a huge growth of underbrush, small trees and natural debris that presented the possibility of a catastrophic fire. Agricultural fields were growing into successional forests and shrublands. Aggressive exotic plant species threaten to eradicate remaining native plant communities.

In order to restore the battlefield to similar conditions found in 1781, the National Park Service partnered with the Palmetto Conservation Foun-dation (PCF) in 2001. The immediate goal was to reduce the excess fuel that could result in a catastrophic fire, endangering park neighbors and the cultural and natural resources of the park. PCF administered the contract to mechanically clear underbrush and selectively remove small trees, deadwood, and slash from cutting and stump grinding on three-quarters of the park’s 843 acres. Technical advice was provided on tree density, selection of trees for cutting and which areas should be opened up.

Key to the restoration effort is the reintroduction of fire back into the ecosystem. A controlled burn was successfully executed early in 2003 by park service personnel and plans call for annually burning a portion of the site. Opening up the site by controlled burning will aid in the reestablishment of native grasses. The seed source from many of the native flora that has lain dormant for two hundred years will be released through successive burns.

By adding these two projects together, the Cowpens staff has saved almost $150,000 of taxpayer money.

While much progress has been made in three short years, the process will take more than 50 years. However, by establishing a sparse hardwood forest interspersed with grasslands and prairies, the visitor can get a sense of what happened in the early morning hours of Jan. 17, 1781 that changed the course of history.