The rural road is busier than when George Hughes was young, before subdivisions notched the countryside.
It cuts through his 60-acre farm near the small but growing southern Greenville County town of Fountain Inn. When his cows need to cross, he places signs on either side of the two-lane track and stops traffic, the way his father once did. The process takes less than a minute.
The drivers he stops don’t always make it easy.
“I’ve had everything from being cursed out for stopping traffic to people jumping out and taking pictures with the cows,” Hughes said.
The trick to quickly getting his 25 head of cattle to greener pastures on the other side of Jones Mill Road is to make sure the calves are running before they get to the asphalt.
“Sometimes they don’t want to step on the pavement,” the 67-year-old said, smiling.
In his youth, the area around the Hughes homestead was dominated by forest and farmland mostly owned by relatives. Back then, the road stayed empty with the exception of the occasional tractor or truck rumbling by.
Now the world around his property is changing, and that transformation is accelerating. Houses are quickly popping up within a stone’s throw. He receives near-daily calls and letters from developers hoping to buy his land to build a subdivision.
The offers keep coming. The letters go straight from the mailbox to his garbage can.
Hughes has no interest in selling the land his family has called home since before the Revolutionary War. He is financially able to resist growing pressure from developers and real estate brokers.
Cows owned by George Hughes stand in a creek on his Fountain Inn property that has been in his family since before the Revolutionary War. As development changes the landscape around his cattle farm, Hughes has no interest in selling. Mark Susko/Special to the Post and Courier
But for many whose families have deep roots in the rural bastions of southern Greenville County and throughout South Carolina, the area's rapid growth and rising property values present difficult choices.
Financial incentives to sell keep growing as the cost of living increases. Farming becomes more difficult as the surrounding area is transformed into a suburb. And with each new generation, ownership becomes more complicated as the connection to the land fades.
Those factors are multiplied as the local economy surges, creating new jobs and a greater demand for housing.
Greenville County's rising population is outpacing most of South Carolina, one of the fastest growing states with close to a half-million more residents in 2020 than in 2010. In the same time, the county grew by close to 75,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
One of every 10 South Carolina residents lives in Greenville County.
The southern part of the county, boosted by three interstates and the growing pull of Greenville, remains largely rural but is rapidly developing.
The populations of Mauldin, Simpsonville and Fountain Inn — strung together along Interstate 385 — grew by about 10,000 combined between 2010 and 2020, a figure that does not include the significant growth in the county just outside their city limits.
At one point in 2021, there were close to 5,000 homes under construction simultaneously in and near Mauldin, with thousands more in the approval pipeline.
As the landscape changes, farmland in the area continues to shrink. Between 2012 and 2017, there was a 6 percent dip in the number of farms operating in Greenville County, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More telling is a 13,000-acre drop in agricultural acreage over the same period — roughly 19 percent — and a 13 percent decrease in average farm size.
Those percentages exceed but align with a statewide trend. South Carolina lost 226,331 acres of farmland during the same five-year stretch.
For families on the edges of the rapidly developing corridor who have long resisted the rising tide of development, legacy is weighed against practicality. History against financial stability. A traditional way of life against a new age.
As the world around changes, the scales are tipping.
Agonizing decisions
At 74 years old, Penny Hawthorne is the sixth generation of her family to live on her land. Her two grandsons, who live nearby with her daughter, are the eighth.
She lives in a house built by an ancestor more than 200 years ago.
Her son, Bo Hawthorne, also lives on the land. He still keeps cattle, but the sprawling property hasn’t served as a fully functioning farm since her grandfather died in 1965.
At one point the family owned 800 acres, but much of it has already been sold and developed.
Still, Hawthorne and her family own hundreds of acres of undeveloped property at the intersection of Fork Shoals and West Georgia roads. The land, about a mile east of Woodmont High School, has long been of interest to homebuilders.
While her sister, who lives in Atlanta, has been ready to sell what remains for years, the idea never had much appeal for Hawthorne. Like Hughes, letters and phone calls from developers have been a regular part of her daily life for more than a decade.
The Hawthorne family is working to sell most of what remains of their ancestral land at the intersection of Fork Shoals and West Georgia roads for residential and commercial development. Their plans have been stalled after Greenville County rejected an initial rezoning request. Mark Susko/Special to the Post and Courier
Like Hughes, the pamphlets previously went straight from mailbox to trash can. But as the years piled up, the offers became harder to ignore.
Recently, Hawthorne and her family agreed to sell to TCC Venture LLC.
“I’m old and I’m not getting any younger,” she said. “And the cost of living is unreal, isn’t it?”
The decision was not an easy one.
“It’s absolutely killing me to do this,” she said.
In October, TCC petitioned the county to rezone 116 acres of the Hawthorne property. The change would make way for a 277-acre development, including a subdivision with up to 861 homes and a commercial area.
If the sale goes through, Hawthorne and her family would retain the small portion of the land that includes their homes and a family graveyard.
When news of Hawthorne’s plans to sell became public, it prompted a groundswell of opposition from nearby residents who worried the development would dramatically alter the character of the area.
In late October, the Greenville County Planning Commission rejected the rezoning. TCC hasn’t given up on plans to develop the land and is in the process of drawing up another request.
In the meantime, Hawthorne is in limbo, uncertain when she’ll be able to sell her land after agonizing over the decision.
A double-edged sword
As individual rezoning and annexation requests for new development continue to draw crowds to local planning commission and council meetings, experts say big-picture planning can help ease the transition the area is experiencing.
Like the families at the heart of southern Greenville County’s ongoing transformation, municipal and county officials are faced with difficult choices. On one hand, the area needs more housing. The county’s inventory is stretched thin as demand grows, inflating prices and keeping many out of the market, according to Nick Sabatine, CEO of the Greater Greenville Association of Realtors.
At the beginning of 2021, there were 3,218 total units on the market in Greenville County, a supply strained by a growing number of people moving to the area.
As of the same time this year, that number had dropped about 31 percent, to 2,226.
“There’s a major shortage of homes for sale,” Sabatine said.
In January, a real estate analyst underlined the county’s housing situation during a local homebuilders convention in Greenville.
"When you're at 0.7 months of supply, you might as well say zero, because there are just some homes that are never going to sell," said John Hunt with Atlanta-based firm MarketNsight. "This is zero inventory. We've never been here before. We're in uncharted territory. I don't know how to fix it."
The only thing helping the area keep up with the surging demand is new construction, Sabatine said. In 2021 alone, 9,816 building permits were issued for new homes in the county, 162 percent of the 20-year average.
On the other hand, residential growth in rural areas strains infrastructure that wasn’t designed for dense development and can create tension between newcomers and residents whose families have lived in the countryside for generations.
Adam Kantrovich, an agribusiness professor with Clemson University, said transforming large swaths of sparsely populated land into subdivisions that each include hundreds of units can put significant strain on local governments.
Country roads weren’t designed for high traffic. Waterlines, sewage systems and pump stations have to be installed, along with new electrical lines. The additional tax revenue barely covers the cost of building and maintaining the new infrastructure, if it does at all, Kantrovich said.
Those issues are commonly exacerbated by the conflicting needs of farming and suburban development.
“You have someone running late and wants to go flying down the road, but now you’ve got this tractor that’s going from one field to the next or going down the road,” Kantrovich said. “That starts complaints.”
The smells, sights and sounds inherent to an agricultural operation can also create friction with new suburban residents who may not be accustomed to farm life.
New development also drives up property values, which, while making it more lucrative to sell rural property, prices farmers out of buying surrounding land to grow — often a necessity for agricultural businesses that operate with razor-thin margins.
Those obstacles added to the already existing challenges of modern farming have pushed younger generations to break from family farming traditions, leaving little reason not to sell other than sentimental attachment.
Jay Marett surveys what remains of his family's once-prosperous dairy operation. The dairy stopped operating in the early 1990s when Marett's elderly grandfather retired and has sat dormant ever since. Marett inherited the property when his mother passed away in 2019 and is now considering selling the land. Conor Hughes/Staff
Legacy vs. progress
Jay Marett had not walked the land that once served as his family’s prosperous dairy farm in a long time.
Three decades, in fact.
The last time he was there, it was for an auction. His elderly grandfather was no longer up to running the operation he built, and there was no one to step into his shoes. So they dismantled the business and sold off the cows and equipment. That was in the early 1990s.
When Marett returned to the land about 20 minutes south of his downtown Greenville home for the first time in November, it remained unchanged in many ways. A renter’s beef cattle still grazed in the rolling pastureland. The barns, which his grandfather and uncle built with repurposed lumber from the the once thriving Camperdown Mill in downtown Greenville after it closed in 1956, still stood.
But time had taken a toll.
The milking stations and feed stalls were falling in on themselves. A tangle of vines climbed up the sides of towering silos, echoing and empty inside.
Marett inherited the property from his mother when she died in 2019 and shares it with his 84-year-old aunt, Dorothea Thomasson. Between the two of them, they own hundreds of acres near the intersection of Log Shoals Road and Interstate 185.
Marett grew up not far from the dairy, riding dirt bikes in the pastures, fishing in the ponds and exploring the woods. Back then, his home was surrounded by farmland, much of it occupied by his extended family.
“People consider that area country now, but it’s not country compared to what it was back when I was growing up,” he said.
Feed silos stand on a defunct family dairy operation off of Log Shoals Road. Conor Hughes/Staff
Marett said he knew early on farming wasn’t for him. He served as a deputy with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office from 1994 to 2008, then went to work at Greenville County Emergency Management. He retired as that agency’s director in September.
Selling the land he inherited has been in the back of Marett’s mind for some time, but he’s never actively sought a buyer. Before she passed, Marett’s mother sold 93 acres nearby. Construction on a new development is underway on that property.
Thomasson, though, has resisted for years.
When sections of her family’s land were seized through eminent domain to make way for a portion of the I-185 Southern Connector, she and her relatives actively fought. Development around her has only intensified since then.
She hoped to hold out and slow the continued transformation of the area her family has called home since the 1800s.
“I didn’t want to sell land because I was hoping to keep the traffic down,” she said. “But that’s a pipe dream and a half now.”
Once resolute, Thomasson has softened.
Recently, Brad Skelton of Red Oak Developers approached Thomasson and Marett about buying the land. He offered ideas on how to salvage the repurposed Camperdown materials, preserve the silos and beautify a granite deposit on the property.
The development could be called Riddle Fields, a nod to Thomasson’s maiden name and the family that called the area home for generations.
For the first time, Thomasson began to seriously consider the possibility of selling the property.
“I’m getting on up in age, and I’ve just got so much for my kids to take care of, and my grandkids,” she said.
Talks with Skelton have slowed but the sale is still on the table. Thomasson remains uncertain about what she wants to do.
For Marett, the eventuality seems inevitable — whether it’s Skelton now or someone else in the future.
“A mile in either direction, it’s development,” he said as he left the property in November. “So, it’s coming.”
Managing growth
In November, Greenville County created a new classification that for the first time gives residents who live on or near farms the option to zone their land agricultural. Large rural portions of the county are currently without any zoning designation.
Farmers throughout the county see it as a way to preserve large-tract farms and promote sustainable growth, particularly if enough landowners in specific areas cooperate with each other.
Landowners are taking measures on an individual basis, as well.
Scott Park, director of land conservation with Upstate Forever, said residents placed more acres under conservation easements in 2021 through his organization than ever before in the nonprofit's history.
Conservation easements are agreements between property owners and land trusts, like Upstate Forever, that protect the character of the land and preclude development while allowing the owner to retain property rights and secure tax benefits.
In southern Greenville County, Upstate Forever has easements on close to 2,700 acres of land, a figure that does not include property protected by other trusts.
There are about 43,000 acres of easement-protected privately owned land across Greenville County, according to Jennifer Howard, executive director of the South Carolina Land Trust Network.
Statewide, about 800,000 acres are under conservation easements. Of those, about 92,700 are in Charleston County and 22,000 are in Richland County, two other areas experiencing rapid growth.
As development accelerates in Greenville County, Park said, so do requests for easements.
But they can’t reverse change. The stream of industry bringing jobs and prosperity to southern Greenville County, as well as rural areas in nearby Spartanburg, Laurens and Anderson counties, will alter the area.
An island in a sea of change
On a cleared, 50-acre site across the road from George Hughes’ farm, an island of water oaks and sweetgum trees stands amid a sea of churned dirt.
About the area of a small house, it looks out of place on the worksite, almost as if the bulldozers missed a spot by mistake.
George Hughes points out a headstone of one of his ancestors in a small family graveyard. Many of the graves date back to before the Revolutionary War. Now, the burial ground is surrounded by churned dirt as a subdivision springs up around it. Mark Susko/Special to the Post and Courier
Rows of lichen-wreathed stones stick up among the roots, weathered and faded but too uniform to be there by accident.
Engulfed by what will soon be a 94-home subdivision, the circle of trees hides a family burial ground stretching back before America was a country, where generations of Hughes’ ancestors are interred.
Hughes stops by the gravesites from time to time, making the walk from his pasture across the road to look at the progress on the coming development and clear away garbage that has occasionally appeared among the headstones since work began two years ago.
Like the cemetery, his land is becoming an island. The burgeoning development that surrounds his ancestors’ headstones is just one of several that have sprung up near his farm in recent years.
He runs a successful dental practice in Simpsonville. Keeping his cows has never been about the money. He tends his herd as a connection to the generations who farmed the land before him.
His daughter, Rebecca Holmes, is tied to the land too. Also a dentist, she co-owns the Simpsonville practice with her father. She started pitching in on the farm when she was 12, driving the family truck to move bales of hay around the property. She and her husband help Hughes with the cows in their free time.
Hughes has an independent source of income, a deep connection to the land and a younger generation invested in his family homestead. That combination makes him uniquely positioned to resist the ever-growing pressure from developers and real estate brokers.
He plans to keep the forests, creeks and pastures on his land untouched for years to come.
But nearby, a subdivision was recently built on a tract previously owned by one of Hughes’ relatives. There are two more already complete down the road. The property encircling the family burial ground once belonged to a cousin.
Hughes can preserve his own land. He can’t stop the world from changing around it.
George Hughes surveys one of his cow pastures off of Jones Mill Road. While the area around his property is being transformed by development and homebuilders regularly contact him about buying his property, Hughes has no interest in selling. Mark Susko/Special to the Post and Courier
