T.L.L. Temple, founder of Southern Pine Lumber Company, first purchased land in what is now the Boggy Slough Conservation Area in 1902. The Temple family has more than a century’s connection to the place and its people. Boggy Slough belonged to the Temple family until the late 1960s when it became a corporate asset of Temple Industries, Temple-Eastex and Temple-Inland, Inc. After 1940, Boggy Slough operated as a wildlife and forest management research and demonstration area with special attention paid to conservation and sustainability. Ownership of Boggy Slough was briefly transferred to International Paper in 2012 with a corporate sale. Under Arthur (Buddy) Temple, III's leadership, the foundation acquired Boggy Slough in December 2013. Before he passed away in 2015, Buddy led the foundation in negotiating an agreement with The Conservation Fund to place a conservation easement over the entire 19,000+ acres. Subsequently, the conservation easement was transferred to the Texas Land Conservancy in 2019.

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The acquisition of Boggy Slough by the T.L.L. Temple Foundation, and the foundation’s commitment to donate a conservation easement across the property to The Conservation Fund, ensures that the land will be protected and managed sustainably as a working forest in perpetuity.

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Boggy Slough is positioned within the Neches River Corridor and includes an 18 mile frontage on the Neches.  Often called Texas’s last “wild” river, the 416-mile Neches River is truly one of the state’s least discovered natural resources. The river’s slow moving water along with its pine and bottomland hardwood forests has been a part of eastern Texas’s history and culture for thousands of years, dating back to when Native Americans and early European settlers depended on the river and its forests for food and shelter.  

 

Healthy forestlands across East Texas, including Boggy Slough, are important habitat for white-tailed deer and eastern wild turkey as well as numerous ducks, songbirds and fish. Its sloughs and oxbows host two sites home to the threatened Neches River rose-mallow.  Additionally, the endangered Texas Prairie Dawn can be found on Boggy Slough.  The property also hosts two clusters of the endangered Red Cockaded Woodpecker and is home to three different species of Texas State champion trees--the largest trees for their species in Texas (Loblolly Pine, Longleaf Pine, and the White Fringe Tree).