SOUTH CAROLINA FOREST RESOURCES AND INDUSTRIES 



Characteristics Of The Forest 



Origin of the Present Forest 



ACCORDING to the records of early settlers, 

 luxuriant forests covered all of South Carolina 

 except the salt marshes, occasional meadows, 

 and Indian clearings. Of the original timber on the 

 piedmont, probably the greater part was cut to clear 

 land for agriculture. Toward the end of the last 

 century, lumbering grew to large proportions in the 

 Coastal Plain; today, only scattered vestiges of the 

 virgin forest remain. Much of the cut-over area, 

 however, as well as a large part of the abandoned 

 farm land, has been reclaimed by extensive second- 

 growth forests, usually pine on the previously culti- 

 vated areas. Second-growth stands now supply 

 most of the commercial timber cut in the State. 



Forest Area 



The Forest Survey, in 1936, classified 10,704,100 

 acres (55 percent of South Carolina's land area) as 

 forest. A small portion, aggregating 25,500 acres of 

 brush-covered swamps, sand dunes, and other re- 



gions which seemed to be incapable of producing 

 merchantable timber, is not discussed in this report. 



The areas classified as forest and nonforest in the 

 three survey units are shown in table 30 and the per- 

 cent of land area forested in the individual counties 

 in figure 18. 



The most heavily timbered part of South Carolina 

 is on the Coastal Plain, where nearly 60 percent of 

 the land is under forest and five counties are more 

 than 70 percent forested. The piedmont is the most 

 intensively developed part of the State, agricultur- 

 ally and industrially, and so has the smallest propor- 

 tion of forest. Even here, however, forests cover 45 

 percent of the land surface. 



Forest-Land Ownership 



About two-fifths of the forest area is owned in 

 relatively large tracts by pulp and lumber com- 

 panies, hunting clubs, investment corporations, and 

 private estates (table 4), the greater part of it near 

 the coast. Farther inland, on the middle and upper 



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PERCENT OF COUNTY AREA 

 ^65-79 M 50-64 

 ^35-49 ^20-34 



Figure 18. — Percent of land in forest, by counties, 

 1940. 



18 



