We hear some version of the same question almost every time a new tract gets cleared along Highway 501 or deeper into Carolina Forest: why does it feel like every available acre around here eventually turns into stacked logs and a construction sign? It’s a fair question, and the honest answer surprises most people. Myrtle Beach pine trees have a working industrial history that goes back nearly a century, and most of the land being cleared for new neighborhoods today was never untouched wilderness to begin with. It was a working tree farm long before it was anyone’s backyard.
Myrtle Beach Pine Trees Were Never Wild in the First Place
The story starts with a roughly 30,000-acre piece of land known as the Buist Tract, originally owned by Burroughs & Chapin. In 1937, that land was sold to the Southern Kraft Company, the same corporate predecessor that became International Paper. Southern Kraft wasn’t buying scenery. It was buying timberland, and the land had already been worked hard for decades before that sale, used for turpentine production and logging going back into the naval stores era, when longleaf pine resin was tapped and distilled for the shipbuilding industry up and down the East Coast.
That same year, 1936 and 1937, Southern Kraft built what became one of the largest kraft paper mills in the world on the Sampit River in Georgetown. The mill transformed Georgetown’s economy almost overnight and, within a decade, was among the biggest producers of its kind anywhere. International Paper, which the company eventually became, held onto the old Buist Tract for the better part of 60 years, managing it as working timberland the entire time. That’s the piece most people miss when they look at a newly cleared lot and assume something irreplaceable just got destroyed. In a lot of cases, what’s being cleared is a managed pine stand that was always scheduled to be cut, just for a different buyer than originally planned.
What Happened to the Land Over the Decades
International Paper’s ownership wasn’t static. During World War II, part of the tract became the Conway Bombing and Gunnery Range for the Army Air Corps. In 1960, the company donated a section that became the original campus of what’s now Coastal Carolina University. Then, starting in 1989, International Paper sold roughly 9,000 acres to the state of South Carolina in pieces, land that’s now protected as the Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve, a genuinely wild, roughly 10,400-acre expanse of Carolina bay wetlands, pocosin shrub bogs, and longleaf pine savanna that’s home to black bears, red-cockaded woodpeckers, and one of the only places in the region where Venus flytraps still grow naturally.
That preserve is the important counterpoint to this whole story, because it shows the land wasn’t uniformly a tree farm. Pockets of genuinely native, ecologically significant longleaf habitat survived within the larger tract and were specifically protected rather than developed. It’s the rest of the Buist Tract, the roughly 11,000 acres International Paper began actively selling and developing starting in the mid-1990s, that became Carolina Forest as we know it today, built out along Carolina Forest Boulevard and River Oaks Drive under a development agreement Horry County Council approved in 1997.
So Were These Pines Actually Indigenous?
This is the part worth getting precisely right rather than oversimplifying in either direction. Longleaf pine genuinely is native to this coastal plain, and it once dominated the Southern landscape almost completely, covering more than 90 million acres across the region at its peak. But between naval stores tapping, aggressive logging, and a 20th-century forestry establishment that leaned hard into fire suppression and fast-growing replacement species, longleaf collapsed to roughly 3 million acres nationally by the late 1990s. Loblolly and slash pine, both easier to manage commercially and faster to harvest, were planted across huge swaths of the cleared land in their place, including, in all likelihood, significant portions of what International Paper managed around Horry County.
So the honest version is this: Myrtle Beach pine trees being cleared today are mostly the product of a century of working forestry, descendants of commercial pine plantations planted and harvested in rotation for pulpwood, not untouched old-growth longleaf forest. The native ecosystem that once covered this entire region didn’t disappear because of today’s developers. It was already dramatically reshaped generations ago by the timber and naval stores industries that built this region’s early economy, and what’s getting cleared now is largely the second, third, or even later generation of planted pine that followed.
Telling the Different Pines Apart
Part of why this history surprises people is that most of us never learned to tell one pine from another, even though the differences are the whole story. Longleaf pine, the genuinely native species, grows needles in distinctive long bundles, often a foot or more, with a shaggy, open crown and a slower growth rate that made it commercially less attractive once faster options existed. Loblolly pine, the species most commonly planted across managed Southern timberland including much of what International Paper held here, grows faster, denser, and straighter, with shorter needles in bundles of three, which is exactly why it became the industry’s default replacement species through the back half of the 20th century. Slash pine, planted in some of the wetter pocosin-adjacent areas around what’s now Lewis Ocean Bay, splits the difference in growth habit and was often used where longleaf struggled with soil moisture. If you’re walking a wooded lot anywhere in Horry County and the trees are growing in obviously straight rows at a fairly uniform size, you’re very likely looking at the descendants of a planted loblolly rotation rather than anything that grew in naturally.
The Modern Clearing Debate Is Still Real
None of this history means every tree clearing happening right now is automatically fine, and it’s worth being straightforward about the current debate rather than waving it away. Horry County lost about 61,000 hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2022, according to Global Forest Watch data, against roughly 16,500 hectares gained over the same period, a meaningful net loss. A 2021 Coastal Carolina University report linked ongoing tree loss to worsening local flooding, and residents have pushed back on specific projects, including a roughly 30-acre tract cleared near Conway’s Burning Ridge Golf Course entrance for development that, as of this writing, still hasn’t been publicly explained by its ownership group.
In response, Horry County has been working through a proposed Preservation Multi-Residential zoning district that would require a 100-foot natural landscape buffer and generally push new rural subdivisions toward smaller lots with more undeveloped land preserved around them. It hasn’t been adopted yet, and it still needs three readings before County Council plus a public hearing, but it’s a direct response to exactly the kind of concern that drives the “why is everything getting cut down” question in the first place.
What This Means If You’re Buying in a Newer Community
If you’re looking at a home in Carolina Forest or one of the newer communities built on former International Paper land, it’s genuinely useful to understand what you’re standing on. This was managed timberland for the better part of a century, land that was always going to be cut, replanted, and cut again under a completely different kind of ownership than the neighborhood HOA you’re reading through today. That doesn’t make the current pace of clearing elsewhere in the county any less worth watching, particularly as it relates to drainage and flooding, but it does mean the pine trees framing so many Grand Strand neighborhoods were never going to stand as old-growth forest regardless of who eventually bought the land.
It’s also worth remembering that the mature pines still standing in and around most established Carolina Forest neighborhoods today, the ones providing actual shade over existing streets and backyards, are generally the stands that weren’t scheduled for near-term harvest when development began, not leftover remnants of something older. Understanding that distinction tends to put a lot of buyers’ minds at ease once they realize the trees they’re falling in love with on a specific lot were themselves part of the same managed system, just a stand that happened to still be standing when the neighborhood plan was drawn.
Browsing what’s currently available across Myrtle Beach is a good way to see how much of today’s inventory sits on land with exactly this kind of working timber history behind it. If you’re curious about the history of a specific neighborhood or lot you’re considering, reach out to our team and we’re happy to dig into what we know about it.