SPANISH FORT, Ala. — If you've traveled down the Causeway, you may have stopped to view not only the beauty of the delta, but also the design of the Five Rivers Delta Resource Center.

Construction of the facility began in 2004, but after several delays, including a hurricane, the facility opened its doors to the public on Friday, April 13, 2007. The seven-building facility has a triple mission — conservation education, land stewardship and outdoor recreation, Director Hank Burch said.

“We are a natural resource based agency,” Burch said. "Function was decided before the buildings took shape."

The programming phase before building consisted of questions including what is this facility and what is it the facility wants to get across to the people, Burch said.

“We were looking for a rustic elegance," Burch said.

The planners had certain things in mind for the building, such as an exhibit hall, a gift shop/bookstore area to market products, such as books about the delta and a theater space, he said. The split in the buildings was done to provide a lot of outdoor space, so there would be plenty of deck spaces for viewing the delta. Even the decorative lattice work design is reminiscent of trees and outdoor woodlands.

The center’s Delta Hall is considered a “signature space,” because of the special paneling, Burch said. The true heart pine wood was custom milled after being retrieved from the bottom of the Choctawhatchee River. There is no real way of dating the lumber, Burch said.

In the 1930s and 1940s, timber was often pulled by oxen, wrapped at river’s edge, placed on rafts and floated to market via water route. According to Burch, sometimes an entire raft would sink. When timber is two feet in diameter, it can deteriorate for three inches or so when submerged, Burch said. It makes a protective crust around the log and what is inside crystallizes and has a very different color and texture. Some people dive for the logs, but it is illegal to remove them from Alabama Rivers. Some people were caught doing this and the timber was stored and used for state’s evidence. It became a ruling that this was state property.

“We had authority to manage that resource,” he said. “It is an extreme rarity to try true heart pine lumber.”

The Longleaf Room was named after the longleaf pine, which is indigenous to the area, he said. Raw logs were taken into the mill and the skin was cut off, and the wood was dried, stacked and stored, depending on the size and girth of the wood. One large table on display is called the “sinker table.”

“Some timbers were floaters and some were sinkers," Burch said, speaking of the table’s name.

Black and white framed photos from the University of South Alabama archives were used to provide a little bit of context for all the changes the area has undergone over the years, Burch said.

The location for the Five Rivers Delta Resource Center had been a Department of Transportation storage spot where entire sections of bridge were stored. It took approximately 40 days of crushing the sections up and then the concrete material was used as road base.

For outdoor recreation, the facility has canoeing and kayaking and may have pontoon boat tours for people to experiences the delta.

"The spark is the delta itself," he said.

The Mobile Bay Delta is the second largest delta, ranking second to the Mississippi River basin. The Delta has a very high biological diversity in plants and animals and is extraordinarily high in turtle species.

Burch said the Delta has more diversity in turtles than any other place in Alabama.

Five Rivers Outfitters, a component of Fairhope Boat Company, has a limited supply of new kayaks and have guided tours. Interested persons can also buy gear and maps.

The driving force for pushing a facility like this was due to Kimberly-Clark's liquidation of land assets and shutting down their mill, Burch said. The state of Alabama purchased 35,000 acres in one single acquisition.

The Alabama Department of Lands Division followed with another few thousand acres purchased on the Mobile County side.

To date, there are now l07,000 acres publicly owned and some are owned by the federal government. With the Ten-Tom waterway project built in the l970s, a lot of channelization had an environmental impact which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mitigated by buying acres in the delta as did Forever Wild, he said.

Many people asked why millions of dollars would be spent on a swamp, Burch said. These questions Five Rivers tries to answer daily in their halls and exhibits. It gives people access to a top public resource. It is an important biological resource and connects this area to the rest of the state, he said.

Two-thirds of the state's water drains through the delta, Burch said.

"We feel that it links us to the entire state,” Burch said. "The first key to land stewardship is getting people connected to the land."

Burch said his hope is that they can reach the younger generation as they continue through school, maybe opening a door for young people to study land management or wildlife biology.

"We are continuously fostering a new crop of folks who really connect to the land," he said.