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Wetlands Protected in West Tennessee

Carroll County Refuge memorializes the late Dr. James T. Holmes

Nashville, TN — March 8, 2007 — A prime wetlands habitat for ducks in West Tennessee will soon be added to a state-managed wildlife area, thanks to the generosity of a Boston physician.

Last year, Dr. Lewis Holmes donated 30 acres of wetlands on the edge of 350 acres of family farmland to The Nature Conservancy’s Tennessee Chapter. Holmes — who grew up in nearby McKenzie, Tennessee, and spent summers on the farm — is now professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Located in northwest Carroll County, the farmland had been assembled and run as several farms by Holmes’ late father, Dr. James T. Holmes. He passed away in 1988, and his wife, Mary Holmes, died in 2004. When their children decided to sell the land, Lewis Holmes talked his siblings into allowing him to purchase their interest in a wetlands parcel so that he could donate it to the Conservancy. 

As luck would have it, the 30-acre parcel adjoins the 250-acre Jarrell Switch Refuge, operated by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA). Regularly flooded by the South Fork of the Obion River, the wetlands there serve as a refuge for large flocks of ducks as well as other water-loving creatures, such as snakes, turtles, and amphibians. The Conservancy is currently working with TWRA to transfer the new tract to the state and add it to the refuge. It’s exactly the outcome Lewis Holmes hoped for.

“That would be a nice contribution,” he says, “to make that wildlife area a little bigger. To me, it’s a commitment to preserve the natural beauty of the place and make it available to everyone, so that 100 or 200 years from now it will still be there. In addition, my parents lived their whole lives in this area. I wanted to do something to honor my father in the area he worked on and passed on to us. It was just an attempt to come up with some creative way to perpetuate his hard work.”

Lewis Holmes approached The Nature Conservancy with this donation because he has been a contributing member to the nonprofit conservation organization since 1989. “I’m really into conservation,” he says, “and I’ve seen the good things they do.”

The Nature Conservancy is the leading conservation organization working to protect the most ecologically important lands and waters around the world for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.