In Burgess, Black residents want to preserve their history amid major development
Before the Huntington family bought the land that today hosts Brookgreen Gardens and Huntington Beach State Park, two major tourist destinations for visitors, the land was used as slave plantations.
A plantation owner named Joshua John Ward owned the plantations that today make up Brookgreen Gardens, as well as others that stretched into Southern Horry County, including the Longwood Plantation and the Oregon Plantation. On Ward’s plantations, 1,092 enslaved Black people lived and worked, growing and harvesting rice, and making Ward the largest slaveholder in the United States. He was dubbed “the king of the rice planters.”
Today, on land once part of those plantations, developers want to clear trees and build 3,872 new homes, including nearly 2,200 houses and 1,600 apartments. The development, at the corner of S.C. 707 and Salem Road, would also feature 13 acres of stores and commercial space, as well as parks and other amenities for residents who live in the neighborhood, making it one of the largest developments in recent history.
But those grand plans have concerned nearby residents, including those in the neighboring Black community. In addition to concerns that the new development could make flooding in the area worse and overburden other infrastructure, some worry that a piece of Horry County’s Black history could be lost. After slaves were emancipated, for example, the Burgess and Freewoods areas become home to many Black farming families who owned their land and passed it down through generations. Those generations built homes, churches, schools and businesses, a history that some fear could get buried by continued development.
Others worry that a slate of new development could raise property taxes in surrounding neighborhoods and price out longtime residents.
Some have a deeper concern: They worry that the graves of former slaves may be on the land that’s slated for development. It’s known that the Blackmoor golf course holds some of those graves, and some in the Burgess community suspect more could be nearby.
For some, the impending development has intensified efforts to preserve the history of Burgess and the neighboring Freewoods Farm.
“We’re already dealing with flooding, we’re already dealing with these animals being displaced...We’re going to lose a lot of our history. Some people are going to lose a lot of their land,” said John Smalls, a farmer in the Freewoods area who also works with the Freewoods Farm living history museum. “Hopefully this will wake my community up.”
From plantations to Black-owned farms
Before the communities near the Waccamaw Neck became known as Pawleys Island and Georgetown, and before the land in the area was formally split into Horry and Georgetown counties, they were part of what was called All Saints Parish, a colonial designation prior to 1865. In the mid-1700s, when colonizers learned to grow rice in tidal waters, such as those near the Waccamaw Neck, plantation owners began buying up the land and establishing slave plantations. Ward, born into the planter class and the most successful of the bunch, eventually had plantations from modern-day Georgetown to Southern Horry County, and enslaved more than 1,000 people.
During the U.S. Civil War, some people enslaved on Ward’s and other plantations managed to escape to the Freewoods area along the Waccamaw River, and then onto Bennettsville, where many stayed. After the end of slavery in 1863, according to local historian Cad Holmes, who lives in Burgess, some came back to the Freewoods area to settle. White farmers in the area, though their names aren’t known, Holmes and others said, sold land near the Waccamaw thought to be unsuitable for farming to Black people freed from slavery.
“They were emancipated with nothing but freedom, no land, no money, no one to house them for a while and in a hostile environment,” said Dr. O’Neal Smalls, a lawyer, professor and historian who today serves as the president and chairman of Freewoods Farm. “It was quite a struggle. They started, of course, with very small strips of land along the Waccamaw River. They had to clear the land, and the biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to farm in wetlands and we’re still having that struggle today, how to farm in wetlands.”
Smalls, who grew up on a farm and graduated from Conway High School, has spent recent years researching and working to preserve the history of the Freewoods and Burgess areas. In 2011, he published a book about Freewoods that’s available at local libraries. John Smalls is his nephew, and many descendants of the Smalls and Holmes families still call the Burgess and Freewoods area home today.
In the earliest days after the end of the Civil War, some formerly enslaved people went back to work on Ward’s plantations, this time demanding pay. That environment, with farm workers demanding fair wages and plantation owners trying to stay afloat after previously relying on free labor, produced riots, Smalls said.
“They tried to grow rice, even the second generation tried to grow rice, but they weren’t successful because they didn’t have control over the water, no dykes like they had on the Georgetown plantations,” he said.
Eventually, Smalls added, “Whites sold and moved away, and Freewoods became a Black farming community.”
As time went on, the Black farmers in the Freewoods and Burgess area expanded and were able to buy more land, each generation more than the last. If a farm produced a profit, the money was used to buy better equipment or more land. World War I turned out to be a boon for the area: The men who left to fight in the war came back with military pensions they used to purchase even more land than their parents and grandparents.
Black farmers eventually switched from rice to cotton as their cash crop, and later to tobacco, Smalls said, allowing the accumulation of land and wealth in the Black community there to continue. A typical farm, Smalls and Holmes said, would feature cows, chickens and other animals, and would grow the food the family lived on throughout the year, in addition to the cash crop. In that way, Smalls said, the area was remarkable: “In Freewoods, the farmers all owned their own land, there were no sharecroppers. They acquired the land over the years.”
By the middle of the 20th century, though, the area began to change. World War II helped push a number of Black people from the South into Northern factories, and the Civil Rights movement in later decades opened up new work opportunities for Black people that hadn’t existed before. Many of those changes, including the invention of the tractor, which made farming easier, pushed people off of farms, causing what Smalls calls “a great transition.”
In the decades since, Smalls said, many Black families have lost the land they once held for generations. In some cases, children sold family land they didn’t want to care for anymore, Smalls said. In other cases, farming families hit hard times, took out a mortgage on their farm, were unable to pay the mortgage, and lost the land to a lender, often a white person.
Other pieces of Black-owned farms in the area were lost through more deceptive means, according to Cedric Blain-Spain, an Horry County minister and one of the leaders of the local Democratic Party. In those cases, a white businessman would approach a Black farming family with a contract, seemingly asking to pay to harvest the trees on their land for timber. But because many Black families at the time didn’t have full formal education, the contracts would actually say the family was selling their land to the businessman, rather than just harvesting the timber. O’Neal Smalls confirmed he’d heard similar stories.
“When you shoot me a bill of goods that you can log my land and then you bring your piece of paper...and then you come back and tell me my 500 acres is now owned by some company?” Blain-Spain said. “Go do your research and find out which person in Burgess, or which family, originally had the land and give them back the land.”
Other land was lost due to land deeds not being formally recorded in county offices. Because land was passed down informally through generations, called heirs property, it meant in some cases that part of a property was sold, but the buyer was able to take the whole plot. Holmes said his family at one point lost 100 acres because a deed was stored in family belongings, rather than recorded at the courthouse.
“Some developers move in, some people help the developers snatch it up…they deep pocket us. We know we were the heirs,” Holmes said.
At one point, Holmes said, a developer tried to vacuum up a number of properties in the Burgess and Freewoods area by claiming they could drill for oil on the land, though that plan didn’t work.
Because Black land ownership in the area has dwindled over the decades, Smalls said he now sees another “great transition” happening.
“Young people moved away and weren’t interested in farming and didn’t follow up on finding ways to preserve the land, and a lot of it has gotten away from them,” he said. “It’s pretty clear to me now that it’s no longer a farming community. It’s becoming something else. Maybe it’s already become something else.”
That’s something John Smalls wants to change, he said. In addition to working with Freewoods Farm, he’s also a farmer himself and has tried to carry that tradition into the present, even though grappling with the area’s history can be “traumatizing” and “hurtful,” he said.
“Me, as a farmer, I plant a seed and it has to go through so much to see that light to become a piece of produce I sell you on the side of the road,” Smalls said. “Hopefully I could rally some of my young folks and put together some historical things. Maybe we put up a big sign.”
Where are the graves?
Because the Burgess and Freewoods areas are near former slave plantations, some residents worry about what could happen to the cemeteries and other graves of their ancestors as the area continues to attract new development.
One such grave site is on the Blackmoor golf course, near the 13th hole, directly to the South of the major planned housing development along S.C. 707. Horry County and the owners of the golf course have taken steps to preserve the site, but not all burials have been identified.
At a community meeting Tuesday, Holmes passed around maps of the cemeteries at Blackmoor and another nearby. Aerial radar detection, displayed on the maps, shows at least 100 burials between the two sites, though not all are marked. On a recent visit to the Blackmoor cemetery site, The Sun News observed around a dozen marked burials, though only some had headstones. Others were merely indentations in the ground indicating a burial with a metal post nearby.
Residents suspect many other Black people are buried nearby in unmarked graves, because they lacked the funds for headstones.
“Freewoods residents buried people on plantations through the 1960s,” O’Neal Smalls said. “They would take deceased relatives back to the plantation. Why did they do that? That’s where the family was buried. The parents were there, the grandparents were there.”
Smalls said his own father was buried near the former Longwoods Plantation.
It’s known that Ward’s Longwood Plantation encompassed what is now known as the Blackmoor golf course, though it’s not clear where other plantation burial sites may be. Black people in the past would use pieces of pine trees that they prepared as markers of graves, which decomposed over time.
“We’re concerned about that cemetery,” Holmes said. “They’re claiming they only found one grave. That can’t be.”
It’s not clear if any grave sites are on the land developers want to build homes on along S.C. 707. Al Jordan, the president of the Greater Burgess Community Association, said the current developer conducted a study that determined the Blackmoor site contained the only graves in the area, though he hadn’t read the study personally.
Ben Wall, the land owner, and Walter Warren, the developer with Thomas & Hutton, did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story. Wall declined to speak with The Sun News last week, and said he would publish a statement for the media about the development project and the area’s history, though The Sun News did not receive such a statement before publication.
Even if no grave sites exist on the land Wall and his partners wish to develop, community members said they’re still worried about the graves off-site. For one, Holmes said, raising the elevation of the land for houses and businesses — as county building standards require — could push additional stormwater onto the cemetery.
“It’s going to affect the cemeteries,” Holmes said. “When they put that development in, they’ll have to raise the elevation, and once they raise the elevation it’s going to force the water on someone else. It could easily get flooded.”
He said he’d like to see the county and developers work to preserve the cemetery from any potential flooding.
“Build a dyke, a brim, around that cemetery, so the water cannot get it,” he suggested. “Let the people rest in peace, they did their work. They built Horry County, they built America. (Their) free labor built America.”
White residents in the Burgess area, too, said they were worried about the development damaging the cemeteries.
“There are probably some cemeteries, slave cemeteries, and they don’t even know where they are,” said Ed Behrens, who lives in the Price Creek neighborhood. “They’ve identified some of them, but there are other ones out there.”
Development causes other concerns
For other Burgess residents, the prospect of a major development in their community has sparked other concerns, from traffic to flooding to wild animals showing up in backyards.
County planners assessed that S.C. 707 is already at 60-65% capacity, and, once it’s fully built, the new development could add 43,000 car trips daily to the corridor. Residents said they worried about traffic accidents as well as potentially losing land if the state or county decides to widen roads in the area in the future.
“It’s already a traffic jam,” said Naomi Bethea, who lives on Holmestown Road. “They need to get the infrastructure straight before they put in all those houses.”
Flooding is another major concern, several residents said. Holmes explained that underneath the topsoil in the Burgess area is a thick clay called “gumbo” that doesn’t drain water well. Rather, water tends to sit on top of the gumbo, he said. And like the rest of the county, the area is flat, and, being near the ocean and Waccamaw River, means changes to land elevation could cause flooding where it didn’t previously occur.
Residents who experience flooding on their properties now worry it could only get worse with new development.
“I have flooding issues on my property that I have to take care of myself. In March and May, it rained and you needed a little boat to come up to my front door,” said Linda Holmes, who lives along S.C. 707.
Several residents also said they worried about the 706-acre development displacing wildlife, pushing the animals onto their properties and potentially harming people.
“If that’s the animal’s land and now you’re talking about taking their habitat they ain’t going to do nothing but come right straight to S.C. 707, Salem Road, Freewood Road,” Linda Holmes said.
“I don’t need to feed nobody ain’t paying no rent,” she quipped.
And still other residents said they worried that such a massive new development could ultimately displace longtime residents. The thousands of new homes developers want to build, some argued, could ultimately raise property taxes in the surrounding communities and some residents may not be able to afford the higher taxes on their homes.
“Those who have remained in the community are subject to be affected more,” said Eula Mae Winningham, who lives in the Freewoods area.
Residents said they would like to see the county and developers invest in community centers in the area, as well as additional schools. The St. James schools near the planned development are either over or nearing capacity, county data shows.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to build that many houses in the community, it’s over crowded as it is,” Winningham, who’s related to the larger Smalls family, said. “I’d like to see them build some recreation center for the kids so the children have something to look forward to.”
Preserving history
For some longtime Burgess residents like Jordan, of the Greater Burgess Community Association, development of the area’s open land was all but inevitable. The 706 acres developers want to build new homes and apartments on is currently zoned as Commercial Forest Agricultural, a designation that would allow them to build hundreds of new homes, up to two homes per acre, even if the county rejects the current development plans.
For residents like John Smalls, that sense of inevitability of new development means residents need to start working to preserve the area’s history now, he said. The community should have come together in such an effort sooner, he argued, but now such a project is urgent.
“I hate that it’s going to happen but in the same sense I could see benefits. There’s pros and cons to everything. I’m not truly mad about it, I’m frustrated...we didn’t set ourselves up to come in and benefit and now we’re in an uproar,” he said. “Why didn’t we make a park? Why didn’t we do something to protect it?”
Smalls said he would like to see large signs in the area to highlight the area’s history to residents, and maybe even a museum set up to preserve the records, people and stories from the surrounding communities. He also suggested someone make a documentary about the area’s history.
His uncle, O’Neal Smalls, agreed that preserving the area’s history is essential.
“It’s important to look at what they did here. They built families, they built churches,” he said. “They started out with bush huts, and then built great churches and then connected churches to conventions or reunions…they built schools.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2021 at 5:12 AM.
