Developers want to build suburbia, locals want this part of Horry to stay rural
A century ago, Sidney Thompson’s farm was the center of the universe — or at least the center of Horry County’s Bucksville community.
Town — Conway — was at least 10 miles away, a journey that would take hours by horse and buggy.
So, the Thompson’s farm — hundreds of acres along S.C. 701 to the south of Conway — grew tobacco and held all of the buildings and community spaces the other residents needed: A tobacco pack house, a gristmill, a general store, a blacksmith shop and other work spaces.
And because the farm bordered the muddy swamps of the Waccamaw River, Thompson said his brothers made bricks from the clay by hand, literally helping to build the surrounding community.
“We did everything to assist this community as far as farming is concerned,” Thompson, 87, said. “They made cart wheels here, wagons. It (was) the center of the community.”
These days, Thompson primarily grows grass and other feed for his 12 beef cattle and the area’s wildlife. He’ll harvest the beef, as well as some corn and soybeans, he said, but he no longer lives off the farm. Families visiting his farm-themed playground and couples getting married on his farm keep his operation afloat.
His neighbors are similar. Some, like Keith Collins, grow crops like corn to supplement their family’s diet but most are content to let the local deer, rabbits and turkeys have the run of their property.
The undeveloped, rural land gives them places to hunt, fish, shoot guns and relax in nature.
But now, developers are eyeing the rural community as the next frontier of Horry County’s rapid growth. Small subdivisions that haven’t required county council approval have already begun springing up.
And in April, a developer pushed forward a 175-acre, 385-home project that went before the Planning Commission.
Those plans are currently paused, both county council member Orton Bellamy and developer David Schwerd confirmed, but they nonetheless sent shockwaves through the surrounding community.
So concerned were residents like Thompson and Collins that they asked Bellamy and the county to begin the “community area plan” process for the Bucksville, Toddville and Bucksport areas, a method that could limit future growth by controlling zoning changes and other aspects of development.
Additional suburban neighborhoods would be a big change for the rural area, and Bucksville, Toddville and Bucksport residents are adamant about keeping their community in tact.
“It needs to remain a rural, farming community,” Thompson said at a recent community meeting to discuss the development plans.
Thompson is not alone.
Collins’ 15-year-old daughter, Margaret, said she, too, was worried about hundreds of houses in the middle of a rural area. What will happen to the people who own hunting properties, she asked? What will happen to the strawberry patches and the working farmers? What will happen to the people who wanted to live in the country?
“When you build all these houses there’s not going to be any country left,” she said at the meeting in Bucksport earlier this month.
In response to the threat of future development, Bellamy said he would help the residents along S.C. 701 establish an “area plan” for their community with Horry County. Those plans serve as long-range planning documents that codify what zoning and what building styles are allowed in a particular area.
Bellamy said he’s planning the first formal meeting for the plan for July.
Such planning is infrequent, but has set a precedent for a rural area like S.C. 701. In 2009, for example, Horry County codified an area plan for the rural S.C. 319 corridor, also in Bellamy’s district. That plan limited new housing in the area to two homes per acre, along with other restrictions on commercial development.
S.C. 701 may not have an area plan in place before new subdivisions are built, but it could help mitigate future development, residents said.
“The community will be an integral part of this and how they want their community to develop over the next 10 or 20 years,” Bellamy said.
It’s future growth that worries residents the most. And county planners like Planning Commission member Pam Dawson said approving that development could in fact signal to other developers that the S.C. 701 corridor is open for business.
Indeed, Schwerd — the longtime Horry County planning director who left for private practice last year — hinged his argument for the 385-home project on the fact that a smaller subdivision was planned nearby.
“It’s not just a community out by itself, it’s a community that’s growing out of the existing development that’s getting ready to start construction,” Schwerd argued in April before the Horry County Planning Commission.
At the same time, though, development in rural areas may be inevitable. In Horry County, a portion of that development happens because families that used to farm for a living don’t anymore. In some cases, children and grandchildren of farmers are left with hundreds of acres of land they don’t want or need, and some opt to sell it to developers for a profit.
That’s the case in Bucksville, Schwerd said. The landowner wants to sell, and development is going to come to the area. The question, he said, is what it looks like.
“I think that development is going to occur,” Schwerd said in an interview. “The community is going to continue to grow.”
He argued that residents participating in the rezoning process gives them more of a say over that development than if they pressure leaders to reject rezonings. Bellamy acknowledged that balancing property rights with the desires of residents can be tricky. He said community members have a right to get involved when selling and developing farmland requires a rezoning.
Then, he said, “all parties are involved because they’re stakeholders. We use the inclusion methodology.”
In the meantime, residents like Collins hope they can slow development like that before it’s too late.
“What I would love to see is 5 to 10 acre home lot sizes and nicer homes and spaced further out but nobody wants to do that because they’re not going to move as quickly, they’re all about turning a dollar over,” Collins said. “But we bought out here because it was in the country. Now the city is slowly catching up with the country.”
‘Damn Yankees’ threaten rural freedom in Horry
On a recent spring day, Thompson drove around the farm his family has owned since 1845 to take stock of everything.
2022 had been dry so far, so Thompson hadn’t planted all of his fields yet but he did have several pastures of rye grass for his cows.
“The red one you see laying down there with the horns? That one’s name is hamburger,” Thompson joked. His chest freezer full of beef, however, was not joking.
On 150 acres down the road from Thompson, Collins was preparing the land where he plans to build a house for his family.
Collins and his wife are both professionals — he a former corporate executive and she a doctor — but chose to live out in the country to raise their family.
It’s worked out well so far: Collins hunts deer and turkey on his property and grows some crops, and his children get to explore the forest, get muddy and experience nature.
For both families, owning dozens of acres in a rural area is a type of freedom, they said. They can hunt. They can fish. They can live off the land if everything else in their life goes bottom-up.
But if the “damn Yankees” — as Thompson calls them — start moving into large subdivisions nearby, that freedom is threatened.
“This is a lost way of life. I can go out and actually stitch my own fish net, I can harvest my own crops,” Collins said. “I can guarantee you there’s going to be some complaints about me shooting a gun at 6 o’clock in the morning.”
“(What) right do they have to tell me that I can’t do that on property that I own?” he questioned. “But they will.”
Several miles away, in the historically-Black Bucksport community, Esther Spain enjoys a similar type of freedom.
She maintains a garden of vegetables and flowers, and raises chickens that roam the area and provide her with eggs. In turn, she shares bag upon bag of fresh vegetables with her neighbors. In the early mornings, she said, she likes sitting on the porch to “watch the beauty of the environment and listen to the beautiful birds and to watch my flowers bloom.”
She worries that suburbia moving into the rural community could take that freedom away.
“When you bring these people into your community...then they have a problem with your rooster crowing or your chickens cackling or your dogs barking,” she said. “What’s going to happen when they do come in? What’s going to happen with the natural environment, with those animals?”
Austin Luken feels similarly. He moved to the Bucksville area after high school because it was affordable.
After a day of work in the tourist-congested Murrells Inlet area, Luken said living in the country is nice because he doesn’t “have to deal with anyone else’s mess.”
He’s not opposed to new development — after all, he said, “everyone needs a place to live,” — but said too much building could force him out of the area.
“If they came in and built a big subdivision behind my house I couldn’t do that,” Luken, now 25, said. “Maybe (the county could) put something in place that limits them to a subdivision every mile.”
Is S.C. 701 Horry County’s next frontier for development?
As Horry County has grown, development has pushed further and further West as builders bought up land.
At first, the Western frontier was the Intracoastal Waterway. Then it was Socastee and Carolina Forest. In recent years, corridors like S.C. 90, 905 and 9, along with Cates Bay Highway, have become the frontier.
In each case, longtime residents saw their once-rural lifestyle become suburbanized. And new residents quickly realized that the once-rural areas they moved into didn’t have all the infrastructure they needed to support hundreds and thousands of newcomers.
In the Bucksville, Toddville and Bucksport communities, residents are worried they’re next.
“We would like for it to continue being a rural, agriculture farm community instead of changing it to a developmental area out here. We would look like Highway 905 and Highway 90 and I’m not interested in that,” Thompson said.
“It would destroy this whole community as far as farming is concerned.”
But as Schwerd noted at the April Planning Commission meeting, development begets development. If the county approves one project, the next developer can argue why not them, too?
Still, he said he understood the residents’ concerns.
“It’s to be expected any time you are changing or altering the exiting property,” he said in an interview. “People are creatures of habit, they’re used to seeing what they see every day.”
But the reason why parts of rural Horry County are subject to development is also part of its history.
In the Bucksville case, the land is owned by the Larry W. Paul Family, which has deep ties to Horry County.
Paul, who died last year, was born on a sharecropping farm and later became one of the area’s first major homebuilders, helping to develop the county for decades. Later in life, he invested in land and sold it to developers, furthering the county’s development.
But Paul also had a deep understanding of the county’s rural heritage, and donated the land for Horry County’s “Living History Farm” which maintains buildings like the ones on Thompson’s farm and holds public demonstrations each year of how tobacco was grown and harvested. It’s a living testament to how the county’s working farms operated.
The 385-home development in Bucksville appears to be caught between those two forces from Paul’s life.
Tiffaney Paul McDowell, Paul’s daughter who is involved in the development, didn’t return multiple requests for comment for this story.
But it’s not just large landowners like the Paul family contributing to development in Horry County. As the generations that relied on farming age, retire and pass on, their children and grandchildren have sold the farmland to developers. It’s a pattern that’s played out all over the county.
As Bellamy noted, those landowners have every right to turn their property into a profit.
And it’s a position Thompson and Collins might each find themselves in one day. Collins’ daughter even asked him recently if he would ever sell their land to a developer.
“And I said, ‘Well, I’m never going to say never but someone would have to come in with an offer so big that I could retire and buy my own private island,’” he said.
Thompson, however, said he would remain stubborn.
“I wouldn’t be a good neighbor, let’s put it that way, as far as they’re concerned,” he said. “I guess I’m just going to turn into an impatient old bastard if it happens.”
This story was originally published May 23, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
