Chapter 5 An Independent Force for Change

Page 130 →Large-scale, commercial logging did not materialize in the South Carolina Lowcountry and Midlands until after the Civil War. Before the 1880s, the South’s relentless focus on agriculture and the lack of capital to fund major enterprises meant that logging tended to occur on a relatively small scale compared to the massive logging operations in the Northeast and, later, the lake states of the Midwest. By the 1890s, however, timber supplies in the Midwest were depleted and Northern capitalists looked south for new lands to cut. Soon, a flood of Northern capital entered the region to take advantage of the cheap land and labor of the South’s weak postwar economy, setting the stage for commercial logging on an industrial scale. The most sought-after trees initially were “Southern yellow pine” on the uplands (chiefly, longleaf pine [Pinus palustris] and shortleaf pine [Pinus echinata]), and bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) in the lowlands.²

For the next several decades, the timber industry in South Carolina was characterized by a plethora of small, intermediate, and large players, each trying to maximize production from its individual land holdings or the lands around its mills. Improvements in technology had certainly contributed to this proliferation. Moving from axes to crosscut saws in the field and from whipsaws to circular saws and band saws at the mill allowed timber to be cut and processed in ever greater volumes. But cutting trees into logs was one thing; transporting them for manufacture into salable products was another thing altogether. Timber volumes counted for little if cut logs couldn’t be moved to a mill. In fact, the difficulties inherent in moving old-growth timber across the flat landscapes of the coastal plain were a major reason why large-scale commercial logging failed to materialize in this part of South Carolina until the late nineteenth century.³

When the boom finally came, cutting tended to concentrate in areas close to water, where loggers could use a low-tech solution like rafting to float logs downstream to the mill. In time, however, as railroads were extended across the state, logging by rail became feasible. In some instances, the impetus to build rail lines in the first place was the need to access untapped, harder to reach stands of timber. But it was the spread of paved highways that allowed timber companies to extend their reach into the farthest corners of South Carolina’s timber base. As they did so, lumber operators with an eye to longevity bought up smaller, outlying operations, setting in motion a process of industry consolidation that lasted throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.⁴

Page 131 →By the year 2000, a handful of multinational forest products companies and institutional timberland investment groups dominated much of the industry in South Carolina, even as non-industrial private landowners continued to own the majority of the state’s timberland and supplied much of the raw material for its mills. Driving consolidation among industry players was the need for ever greater efficiency to meet the growing market demand for wood and compete with rival companies. Over the latter half of the twentieth century, companies made a concerted effort to build mills that could use all parts of the tree, including leavings once considered waste, to make products such as fiberboard and pulp. Consolidation generated financial resources to build the plants that produced these products. Consolidation also produced a large land base that could be reforested at scale, using methods that lowered the cost of planting, growing, and harvesting trees.

The Holly Hill Lumber Company exemplified many of these industry trends of the mid to late twentieth century. The company was formed in 1927 by Lawrence E. Miller Sr. and William J. Colvin. Miller, a native of Lexington County, South Carolina, served in World War I in the office of the US adjutant general in Washington, DC, and on the staff of Gen. John J. Pershing with the American Expeditionary Force in France. Miller’s lifelong friend and business partner, Colvin, was born in Fairfield County and graduated from Erskine College in 1909, after which he became the principal and taught mathematics at a school in Mullins, South Carolina. Together, Miller and Colvin participated in a variety of business ventures over the years, including lumbering, cattle raising, mining, and cement manufacturing, all centered around the town of Holly Hill. So important were the two men to the life of Holly Hill that in 1971 the town held a testimonial dinner to thank the Miller and Colvin families for their contributions to the business and civic life of the community.⁵

Miller and Colvin may have met as salaried employees of the Dorchester Lumber Company of Badham, South Carolina. Here they worked for ten and fifteen years, respectively, before deciding to acquire the R. L. Moore Lumber Co. of Bowyer, near Holly Hill. They initially called their new operation the Holly Hill Cypress Company but soon renamed it the Holly Hill Lumber Company. Chartered to cut, manufacture, and sell lumber and its byproducts at wholesale and retail, as well as to buy and sell real estate and timber rights, Holly Hill operated for most of its existence from a base in the Four Holes area of Orangeburg County, not far south of Bowyer and Holly Hill. It branched out over time to have timber harvesting operations in multiple locations and mills at Kingville, Denmark, Ridgeville, Bonneau, Pregnall, Black Branch, and Walterboro, South Carolina.⁶

Page 132 →The Bowyer mill, located on the Atlantic Coast Line railroad about one mile south of Holly Hill, began operations under its new ownership on September 1, 1927. The mill initially employed around seventy-five men and cut approximately 25,000 board feet of lumber per day at what was said to be one of the largest hardwood and softwood manufacturing plants in the section at that time. Following a practice they would repeat in subsequent acquisitions, Miller and Colvin upgraded the former R. L. Moore facility, installing a new planing mill sometime in 1928. By 1935, the mill employed 125 men and had increased production to 40,000 feet of rough lumber per day.⁷

The Denmark, South Carolina, facility followed in 1933, when Holly Hill acquired the sawmill of the Zickgraf Lumber Company, built about ten years before. The location of this mill was particularly advantageous, as Denmark was served by three major railroads and two highways, making conditions ideal for shipping product. Holly Hill thoroughly remodeled the facility, installing a state-of-the-art planing mill and a cross-circulating dry kiln. By 1935, it too employed 125 men and had a production capacity of 40,000 board feet per day.⁸

In 1932, seeking to cut a tract of hardwood timber on the Santee River, Holly Hill installed a four-foot bandsaw at Ferguson, South Carolina, the former headquarters of the SRCLC. Three years later, when cutting was complete, the company moved this operation to Ridgeville, South Carolina, about seventeen miles southeast of the town of Holly Hill. That mill employed about seventy-five men and had a capacity of 25,000 board feet per day. By the end of 1935, the company’s band mills at Bowyer, Denmark, and Ridgeville together could cut over 100,000 board feet per day of Southern pine, cypress, and hardwoods, both rough and dressed. The mid-1930s also saw Holly Hill acquiring timberland in and around the Congaree Swamp in lower Richland County. Starting around 1935, it acquired around 10,700 acres of swamp and upland to supply a company mill in the now-defunct town of Kingville. By mid-1937, Holly Hill employed 625 men at its four band mills: 175 at Holly Hill; 175 at Denmark; 150 at Ridgeville; and 125 at Kingville. Combined, the four mills had an impressive capacity of 30 million board feet per year, sawing pine, hardwood, and cypress.⁹

In 1937, Miller and Colvin acquired the Chapman-Storm Lumber Corporation, the assets of which would go on to form the core of Holly Hill’s future operations. Chapman-Storm had for years been a major producer of cypress in the Morgan City, Louisiana, area until the exhaustion of its timber base prompted it to move its operations to South Carolina. In 1927 it built a mill at Four Holes and leased timber from the Minnesota-South Page 133 →Carolina Land & Timber Co., securing an estimated fifteen-year supply of quality cypress (see chapter 6, this volume). Within a decade, however, a legal dispute between Chapman-Storm and Minnesota-South Carolina precipitated a sale of the assets of both entities to Miller and Colvin.¹⁰

The sale to Miller and Colvin included around 16,000 acres of timberland in Orangeburg, Dorchester, and Berkeley counties, much of which consisted of virgin timber in the Four Holes Swamp along the boundary between Orangeburg and Dorchester counties. Also conveyed was the sawmill at Four Holes, three miles south of Holly Hill, idle for almost seven years before the sale. Miller and Colvin developed plans to revive and modernize the mill, operating it under a separate partnership known, like the original company, as the Holly Hill Cypress Company. Anticipating employing up to 400 men at this facility and doubling its capacity, the partners planned upgrades that included new machinery, two new dry kilns, a fire suppression system, and replacement rail trackage for hauling cut timber to the mill. When the refurbished mill came online in late 1938, it increased the total productive capacity of Holly Hill Lumber and Holly Hill Cypress to about 50 million board feet per year, making them together one of the largest lumber outfits east of the Mississippi. (The two affiliates merged sometime after 1941 and the mill complex at Four Holes, later referred to simply as the Holly Hill mill, became the company’s main manufacturing plant.) Practically all of Holly Hill’s lumber output during this period was shipped to eastern wholesale markets.¹¹

Holly Hill continued to expand its timber base after the Chapman-Storm acquisition. Insurance records from 1961 give an idea, albeit incomplete, of the extent of its holdings at that time. Appraisal summaries show that the company owned more than 37,000 acres in South Carolina, including lands in the Four Holes and Congaree swamps and acreage near the Santee River, among other tracts. Holly Hill continued to buy and sell land in succeeding years. In 1978, for example, it sold 11,850 acres in and adjoining the Congaree Swamp to Georgia-Pacific Corporation. By 1981, Holly Hill still owned over 72,000 acres of timberland—all of it in South Carolina, apparently—despite prior land sales.¹²

Unlike such major forerunners as the SRCLC, the E.P. Burton Lumber Company of North Charleston, and the enormous Atlantic Coast Lumber Company of Georgetown, Holly Hill seems not to have relied in any substantial way on waterways to get cypress and other bottomland timber to its mills. Page 134 →Rather, it picked up where SRCLC left off, cutting railroad tram lines into its extensive bottomland and other holdings in the coastal plain, and connecting these feeder lines to trunk lines serving its mills.¹³ A help-wanted advertisement from 1950 hints at the nature of Holly Hill’s railroad operations:

WANTED—Experienced railroad logging foreman. Must be experienced in use of steam logging locomotive, overhead skidders, and crawler tractors. Holly Hill Lumber Co., Holly Hill, S.C.¹⁴

Railroad logging at the company’s holdings in both the Congaree Swamp near Kingville and in Four Holes Swamp began in the mid-1930s and lasted into the 1950s. At Four Holes Swamp, Holly Hill added to the tram lines previously constructed by Chapman-Storm. At a time when large steam engines were being sold for scrap or sent to foreign countries, small engines continued to work the woods for Holly Hill and other companies, fueled in part by waste wood from milling operations. By 1952, Holly Hill was still operating two small steam engines on narrow-gauge railroad in the western part of Four Holes Swamp, near Providence, South Carolina.¹⁵

Logging from elevated trams was particularly useful for getting virgin cypress out of waterlogged swamps. However, constructing such lines, rudimentary and temporary as they were, was more expensive and time consuming than building lines at grade on upland areas. Moreover, the equipment used to haul logs to these lines was quite destructive. Large rail-mounted machines called overhead skidders dragged huge cypress logs across sodden ground with long cables, destroying young trees and saplings in the process and etching scars on the landscape that remained visible for years.¹⁶

As loggers liquidated the last big stands of old-growth cypress and longleaf pine, far-sighted companies like Holly Hill sought to lessen their impact, managing their timberland as a long-term investment. Doing so, while cutting costs, meant using roads and logging trucks to get smaller, second-growth timber to the mill. In 1935, Holly Hill’s president, L. E. Miller Sr., stated that “good roads and the present efficiency of trucks make log hauling over a radius of thirty miles feasible.” This trend accelerated over the coming decades, allowing Holly Hill to supply its mills not only with timber from its own lands, but from other landowners, large and small. In the early 1940s, for example, Holly Hill was a major purchaser of timber from the South Carolina Public Service Authority for the Santee-Cooper hydropower project (see chapter 3, this volume). Holly Hill also actively encouraged the new “tree-farm” movement, intended to get landowners to plant trees on their land and actively manage it for wood production, Page 135 →wildlife habitat, and other uses. The company’s “Tree Farm Family Program” provided small landowners with seedlings, loans of equipment, and guidance from company foresters, allowing them to replant logged land and convert marginal crop land to productive timberland.¹⁷

Holly Hill’s zenith as an industry leader took place in the late 1960s and 1970s when it capitalized on South Carolina’s growing network of paved roads to extend its reach far into the timberlands of the coastal plain. Increasing demand in the home-building and consumer products markets also prompted Holly Hill to supplement its lumber business with engineered wood, made by combining raw wood and wood byproducts with resins or adhesives. The company began to grow rapidly, constructing mills devoted to plywood, fiberboard, and wood chips.

Reaching a position of leadership initially involved strategic retreat and consolidation. By 1951, the mills at Bowyer and Ridgeville apparently were closed or sold, leaving the company with mills at Holly Hill, Denmark, and Kingville. The Kingville mill closed around 1955, though the company retained and expanded its adjoining acreage in lower Richland County, which it managed as commercial timberland for another twenty-plus years. The Denmark facility closed or was sold, too, so that by 1970 the company had two principal mills, one at Holly Hill and the other, a new facility, at Walterboro.¹⁸

Holly Hill Lumber announced the Walterboro plant in 1969 as a $1.5 million “Chip-N-Saw” and Chip Mill. Believed to be the first of its type in the Carolinas and Georgia, the mill was designed to convert log residues into pulp chips as a byproduct of the lumber-making process. The chips were destined for the growing and increasingly important regional pulp and paper industry. The mill had a projected capacity of 20 million board feet of Southern pine lumber annually, together with 50,000 tons of pine chips and 100,000 tons of hardwood chips. The mill’s specialty lumber product was to be Southern Pine Stud Grade, intended for vertical load-bearing walls. Stud grade had straightness requirements even more stringent than those for No. 1 Southern Pine Framing Grade. Raw materials would come from company holdings as well as other lands in Colleton and adjacent counties. Access to Interstate 95, soon to be completed, would extend the facility’s reach into Georgia.¹⁹

As the Walterboro facility came online, the company’s main sawmill at Holly Hill continued to be profitable. The facility had a lumber capacity Page 136 →of 150,000 board feet per day, enough to serve national and international markets. In 1969, for example, Holly Hill loaded 1.6 million board feet of South Carolina pine lumber at Charleston for shipment to Rotterdam, possibly the largest single shipment of lumber ever loaded on the east coast up to that time. As the 1970s began, the company was said to “represent one of the most comprehensive and extensive complexes of forest products and forestry enterprises in the southern United States.”²⁰

In July 1971, the federal Economic Development Administration announced a $3.25 million loan to the company to assist with construction of a new $6.5 million plywood plant at its main mill complex at Holly Hill. The plant had a projected capacity of 90 million square feet of Southern pine plywood and anticipated employment of 200 workers—this at a time when the Southern pine plywood industry was comparatively new, providing just over a fifth of the nation’s total plywood supply. The first shipments of plywood left the plant in July 1972. By then, Holly Hill was producing about 85 million board feet of Southern pine lumber annually at its plants in Holly Hill and Walterboro and ranked among the top one hundred lumber producers in the nation.²¹

Responding to a decrease in the supply of quality sawtimber and an overall increase in the demand for wood, Holly Hill sought ways to maximize the use of the timber resource and improve the efficiency of the milling process. In late 1973, the company announced plans to expand its mill complex at Holly Hill by constructing a $20 million plant for producing medium density fiberboard (MDF), an engineered wood product made by breaking lumber manufacturing byproducts and other residuals into wood fiber, then combining the fiber with a synthetic resin adhesive under heat and pressure to create a solid, dense board. Fiberboard is generally denser than plywood. The new plant was projected to employ approximately 130 people and have a production capacity of 500–600 tons per day, or an annual production equivalent of 110 million square feet. According to the company, it would be “the largest and most efficient fiberboard plant in the world.” Holly Hill’s then-president, Martin C. Colvin noted that with development of a fiberboard plant the company had now completed its “utilization circle” in the manufacture of forest products—“the whole tree concept has become a reality.” Production at the plant commenced in 1975.²²

L. E. Miller Sr. served as president of Holly Hill from 1927 to 1967, after which he concentrated his attention on the Santee Portland Cement Corporation, Page 137 →organized by the Miller and Colvin families in 1964. (The cement facility, located at Four Holes just east of the Holly Hill Lumber Company mill complex, mined limestone on the north side of Four Holes Swamp and was a major producer of cement for construction.) Miller was succeeded as president of Holly Hill Lumber Company by Martin C. Colvin, son of company cofounder William J. Colvin. Martin Colvin actively pursued Holly Hill’s growth strategy of the 1970s, while at the same time becoming an active voice in national and regional trade groups for the industry. A director of the National Forest Products Association beginning in 1964, he was elected chairman of the board in 1975. Among his other industry offices were director and president of the Southern Forest Products Association, trustee of the American Forest Institute, president and chairman of the Southern Pine Association, and chairman of the Economic Council of the Forest Industries.²³

Of major concern to Colvin and other industry leaders in the 1970s was the perceived long-term inadequacy of the timber supply for housing construction and other needs. The major underlying reason for this supply constraint, apart from a spike in housing starts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was the condition of Southern forests after the destructive first wave of industrial forestry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the years before World War II, as timber companies began to acquire timberland for long-term management, much of the available land consisted of second- and third-growth natural stands that had been successively stripped of their best trees, a process known as “high-grading.” These residual forests usually lacked adequate stocking of trees of high genetic quality, the kind best suited for making wood products. Industry foresters concluded that converting residual natural forests into pine plantations, using the best available seedlings and planting trees in rows like corn, was “the only sure way to get the land back into production quickly with full stocking.”²⁴

Conditions were no better on the lands of non-industrial private landowners across the South, and these lands, some 141 million acres, mostly in small tracts, supplied 60% of the raw materials for lumber and plywood mills in the region. However, few nonindustrial landowners had the financial resources, technical expertise, or even the interest to practice the kind of forest management that would allow their land to reach its productive potential. Net growth rate per acre on these lands was far less than half of what was possible. In 1969, acting on behalf of the Southern Pine Association, Colvin presented a plan to Congress to dramatically increase the wood supply from nonindustrial private landowners. Among its principal Page 138 →recommendations was reapportionment of federal cost sharing programs to increase assistance to small landowners for planting and timber stand improvement. Consistent with the Southern Pine Association plan and its own long-standing support for tree farming, Holly Hill invested around a half million dollars in site preparation and tree-planting equipment for use on its own lands and those of community members who asked for assistance.²⁵

Gradually, tree farms gave way to pine plantations on many nonindustrial lands in the South and pine plantations came to dominate industrial timberland. Creating a pine plantation involved clearcutting a tract of land, installing linear raised beds (as needed) to improve drainage, planting genetically improved seedlings in straight rows, and applying herbicide to suppress competing vegetation. Pine plantations were more efficient to manage and harvest than natural stands and produced more volume of pulpwood and sawtimber per acre, thus improving profits. In fact, it has been suggested that the pine plantations of the Coastal Plain represent an early stage of crop domestication. Remnant pine plantations developed by Holly Hill can still be seen today in the upland portion of Congaree National Park.

During the 1970s, timber industry concerns about future timber supplies ran headlong into the agenda of an ascendant environmental movement, which wished, among other things, to limit logging on the national forests and to set aside large swaths of mostly federal land, creating natural preserves for habitat protection and recreation. This agenda met resistance, from Holly Hill and others. In 1972, Holly Hill’s chief forester, Z. Dale Wright, testified before Congress regarding legislation to create a system of special management areas in national forests east of the Mississippi. Speaking on behalf of the National Forest Products Association and the Southern Forest Products Association, Wright stated that “the industry is basically opposed to strict ‘preservation’ of excessive amounts of land because this would deny fulfillment of recreational and other needs of the Eastern public.” Reflecting industry concerns about timber supplies, he counseled considering new preservation legislation only after the Forest Service had completed an upcoming report, which “should help to determine what the demand for forest products will be, what need there is for growing timber on commercial forest lands and what impact total withdrawal of significant portions of such lands would have on timber Page 139 →production for housing, general construction, pulp and paper products and other products derived from wood.”²⁶

Concerns about timber supplies prompted Holly Hill to oppose inclusion of its lands in proposed preserves. In practice, that meant opposing federal acquisition of a large part of the Congaree Swamp for inclusion in the National Park System. In 1974, environmental advocates put forward an initial proposal to establish a 70,000-acre Congaree Swamp National Preserve in Richland and Calhoun counties, a configuration that would have entailed the acquisition of 12,000 acres of Holly Hill land. The large size of the proposal sprang from a desire to protect and buffer a 15,138 tract of old-growth and mature forest known as the “Beidler Tract,” named for the Beidler family of Chicago, owners of SRCLC. Holly Hill president, Martin C. Colvin actively opposed park legislation for Congaree Swamp, telling The State newspaper in Columbia that the huge trees of the Congaree Swamp were not long for this world. They had reached the end of their life cycle and “just as humans are born and live and die, these trees are dying. Many of the people involved in these environmental movements simply do not understand the life cycle of a tree.” In 1976, he spelled out the economic basis of his position in testimony before Congress:

It is widely predicted that by the year 2000 the 13 Southern States must provide the majority of the Nation’s lumber, plywood, and paper products in a volume twice as great as our region produces today. To be able to meet that responsibility South Carolina must achieve corresponding increases in timber growth mainly in the nonindustrial private forest lands … .

The public should be made aware constantly of the cost of restricting private lands for public purposes. Few citizens realize the consequences of removing land from productive economic use, both in terms of limiting the supply of land and reducing tax revenues.

Our industry is beginning [in the mid-1970s] to pull out of one of the severest depressions since the 1930s [caused by a downturn in housing starts]. I do not think it is a secret that housing is in a deep depression and of course our industry is almost entirely dependent on the housing industry for life … .

. . . If [our land at Congaree] is withdrawn from commercial production, it will have a profoundly adverse effect on the well being and welfare of approximately 1,200 of my company’s direct employees and logging contractors.

Page 140 →Colvin also opposed preservation of the Beidler Tract because “the only way the public could have access to [parts of] the Beidler property in a comfortable high-ground fashion would be over our property.” For its part, the South Carolina Forestry Association, advocating the industry position on the proposed preserve, felt that acquisition of the 55,000 acres bordering the Beidler Tract was unnecessary and ill advised. In its view, these lands, including the Holly Hill acreage, “contain nothing unusual, [since] harvesting, planting, and regeneration of the swamp have been going on [in portions of the area] for the last 150 years.”²⁷ In late 1976, attempting to thread the needle, Congress established a new National Park Service unit consisting solely of the 15,138-acre Beidler Tract (see chapter 7, this volume). The new Congaree Swamp National Monument, expanded twice and redesignated Congaree National Park in 2003, would eventually come to contain almost 27,000 acres, of which just over 6,000 acres would be former Holly Hill lands.

By the late 1970s, Holly Hill remained an important player in the Southeastern regional lumber market, but its apparent strength hid substantial vulnerabilities. Having incurred serious debt to finance various expansions, it was ill-prepared to weather a downturn in the housing market, which came in due course in 1980. Starting in late summer 1979, the Federal Reserve had sharply curtailed growth in the money supply to address slow growth and mounting inflation (popularly known as “stagflation”). The result was recession. Within a year the interest rate for home mortgages rose to over 16 percent, which, combined with bad weather, caused a serious and sudden plunge in housing starts. For Holly Hill the results were dire, as new housing construction traditionally accounted for 60 percent of the company’s business. With only about half as many houses being built in early 1980 as in the previous year, company president M. C. Colvin observed that, “It’s just been devastating to us. There’s absolutely nothing stirring. In my 33 years of business, I’ve never seen such a stillness in the marketplace.” In the early spring the firm closed its plywood division in Holly Hill, putting 129 persons out of work. Soon thereafter, it reduced its sawmill operation from two shifts to one, affecting another 155 workers. Several weeks later it laid off 80 employees at its Walterboro facility. All told, by late April 1980, 364 of the firm’s 1,170 workers had been laid off, leaving around 800 persons still working for the company. Colvin was shaken. “It’s just a nightmare. I would say it is the nearest thing to a death Page 141 →in the family.” He projected that normal yearly production of about 125 million board feet of lumber and 110 million board feet of plywood would be reduced by half, or more.²⁸

Difficult as the situation was, Colvin tried to remain optimistic. “The demographic demand for housing is tremendous for the balance of the 1980s, and I’m very optimistic that once we’re through this money crunch, home building will be back to normal and in an even more vigorous fashion because of the very nature of the demand.” His sense was that “the crisis is temporary [and] in six months to a year we’ll have it behind us.” In the meantime, he noted, production of fiberboard would probably go up because that product goes largely to the furniture industry and that industry is still strong.²⁹

Colvin’s optimism turned out to be unwarranted. While the industry as a whole rebounded once the inflation rate came down, Holly Hill did not. The company had expanded too rapidly with its new facilities at Holly Hill and Walterboro, and the ensuing “money crunch” of 1980 was too much to bear given the company’s debts. Speculation was rife that the financially plagued company was vulnerable to acquisition. In March 1981, less than a year after the punishing layoffs of spring 1980, the company was sold. Georgia-Pacific Corporation, a Portland, Oregon, firm then valued at $4.1 billion, acquired Holly Hill Lumber Company in exchange for about one million shares of Georgia-Pacific stock. The plywood mill at Holly Hill, by then fully closed and the equipment auctioned off, was not included in the sale. Soon, the once high-flying business started by L. E. Miller Sr. and William J. Colvin in 1927 was being integrated into Georgia-Pacific’s Southern Division under the name G-P Holly Hill. And with that, a company that for years had shown striking growth, doubling its production even in the early years of the Great Depression, was no more.³⁰

The takeover by Georgia-Pacific was part of an escalating trend toward consolidation in the forest products industry. The Holly Hill acquisition expanded G-P’s timber holdings in South Carolina by over 72,000 acres, significantly increasing its resource base. (This number did not include Holly Hill’s 11,850 acres near Kingville, which, as noted above, G-P had previously acquired in 1978.) By 1985, Georgia-Pacific would own over 380,000 acres in the state. Georgia-Pacific also found Holly Hill attractive because its assets complemented the plywood plants, sawmills, stud mills, and furniture company (Williams Furniture, chapter 3, this volume) that G-P already owned in the state. For example, the fiberboard produced by Holly Hill could be used at the Williams Furniture division in addition to being sold to other customers. However, consolidation was not without cost to Page 142 →the local community. Georgia-Pacific laid off 230 people at the pine lumber sawmill in Holly Hill to modernize and expand the fifty-year-old facility (this mill apparently being the one Holly Hill acquired from Chapman-Storm in 1928). When the mill finally reopened fifteen months later, in June 1982, it employed only 160 hourly workers, since fewer employees were needed in the upgraded facility.³¹

Colvin may have been wrong about the future prospects of the Holly Hill Lumber Company, but his optimism about the future health of the South Carolina timber industry turned out to be well-founded. Industry players generally were confident that demand would be strong once the current recession ended. In 1982, the year after Georgia-Pacific’s acquisition of Holly Hill, the Clemson University Extension Service reported on industry plans to invest $1.3 billion in South Carolina by 1985. Plans were in place to build new mills and modernize existing mills across the state, including a new paper mill near Columbia and a new pulp mill in Kershaw County. The Kershaw County mill reflected a growing shift in the state toward the production of wood pulp, by this time the number one user of trees in the state.

One of the new facilities cited by Clemson was a wood treatment plant near Holly Hill built in 1982 by Martin C. Colvin and other former Holly Hill Lumber Company managers. That plant, operating under the name Holly Hill Forest Industries, Inc., was still operating in 1987 but seems to have closed soon after.³² Meanwhile, the original Holly Hill sawmill sold to Georgia-Pacific continued to experience difficulties. Initially closed, as noted above, for modernization and expansion, it remained closed for months after the sale due to poor market conditions for pine lumber. When the sawmill finally reopened in June 1982, it remained vulnerable to permanent closure, being much less efficient than Georgia-Pacific’s high technology, computerized operation at Ellabell, Georgia, near Savannah, and considerably less safe than other G-P facilities, as measured by its rate of time-lost accidents. The adjacent fiberboard plant at the Holly Hill complex was in better shape, having opened in 1975 with mechanized controls. It was later upgraded by G-P with more sophisticated equipment. For Georgia-Pacific, 1983 looked like it would be a turnaround year, if the economy picked up and interest rates stayed low. And it was.³³

Page 143 →Throughout much of its existence, the Holly Hill Lumber Company was at the forefront of innovation and trends in the forest products industry. As the post–World War II industry expanded from lumber to engineered wood, shifting increasingly to pulp and paper as a major source of its profits, Holly Hill actively built new state-of-the-art facilities to meet the national and international demand for Southern wood products. Its accomplishments over five decades are impressive for a privately held company. In the end, however, it lacked the financial resources to remain independent.

Holly Hill was hardly unique in falling to the Georgia-Pacific juggernaut. Founded in the same year as Holly Hill, Georgia-Pacific owned one million acres of timberland nationally by 1960. Its acquisition of small plywood concerns was so aggressive that in 1972 it was forced by the Federal Trade Commission to spin off 20 percent of its assets into a new company, Louisiana Pacific Corporation. Still the acquisitions continued. Three years after it acquired Holly Hill, G-P purchased a Kraft paper and linerboard mill in Monticello, Mississippi, from the St. Regis Paper Company. The acquisition brought with it over 300,000 acres of forestland. In 1988, G-P acquired Brunswick Pulp and Paper Company’s pulp and paperboard mill in Brunswick, Georgia, plus three sawmills and more than 500,000 acres of Georgia forest. These are but two examples of many that could be cited. G-P’s acquisition activity was enormous, and nationwide. By 1997, it owned nearly 6 million acres of timberland, most of it in the US Southeast.

For all its acquisitions, Georgia-Pacific was neither the only, nor the biggest, forest products company to jump on the growth bandwagon in the last half of the twentieth century. Weyerhaeuser, Champion International, Westvaco, and International Paper were just some of the other players seeking to grow as large as possible to compete in national and international markets. Weyerhaeuser, for example, owned around 750,000 acres in South Carolina by 2016, including the former Holly Hill/Georgia-Pacific lands adjoining Congaree National Park. Today, much of the US timber industry is dominated by multinational corporations, real estate investment trusts (REITs), timber investment management organizations (TIMOs), and Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs). That said, the majority of South Carolina timberland remains in the hands of approximately 100,000 nonindustrial private landowners.³⁴

A major part of Holly Hill’s legacy is its approach to forestland management, which Georgia-Pacific continued and later modified. For years, Holly Hill was a major supporter of tree farming as a way to assure a sustainable Page 144 →supply of timber in South Carolina and the region, and its view of trees as a farmable crop—held in common with many others—took hold across the Southeast in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly on industrial forestlands. Over time, the tree farm evolved into the pine plantation, as Holly Hill and others converted many natural pine and mixed pine-hardwood forests into row after row of planted pine. The upshot was that the timber shortages feared by Holly Hill and others never materialized, and not just because Canadian lumber imports began to flood the market in the 1980s. The increasing volume of wood from regenerated and plantation forests in the South meant that by the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the South had the potential to supply more coniferous roundwood than traditional markets (wood pulp, lumber, panel products, poles, and pilings) were expected to require for the foreseeable future. The concern today is how to cope with a “wall of wood” hitting the market as plantations reach harvestable age. For South Carolina growers of pulpwood, concern has already turned to fear, with major paper mills in Georgetown, Charleston, and Savannah, among other places, closing for good in 2024 and 2025.³⁵

A more intangible, yet lasting, legacy of Holly Hill Lumber Company’s five decades is the role it ultimately played in the protection of significant natural lands in South Carolina. Almost by happenstance, Holly Hill assembled a large timber base that adjoined two of the most important natural areas in the state, namely, the mature and old-growth forests owned by the Beidler family at Congaree Swamp (15,138 acres) and Four Holes Swamp (3,415 acres), both legacies of SRCLC. As events transpired, the preservation of those two areas, discussed in succeeding chapters of this volume, did not pose an immediate threat to timber supplies or employment opportunities in the state, as Holly Hill management and others had feared. But preservation of the Beidler family/SRCLC lands, in and of itself, was not enough to ensure their long-term protection and ecological integrity. For that to happen, additional large tracts of buffering land were needed, and former Holly Hill lands were there to help meet that need. Today, just over 22 percent of Congaree National Park’s almost 27,000 acres consists of former Holly Hill land, most of it naturally regenerating bottomland forest. Likewise, a substantial portion of the 18,000-acre Francis Beidler Forest at Four Holes Swamp consists of cypress swamp once owned by Holly Hill. For generations to come, the people who visit these preserves, not to mention the wildlife and plants that thrive in protected habitats, will be the beneficiaries of the land acquisition program of the Holly Hill Lumber Company.

1. 1. Page 145 →“Holly Hill Businessman L. E. Miller Sr. Dies,” The State (Columbia, SC), November 18, 1974, 8-A; E. Stuart Gregg, Jr., A Crane’s Foot (or Pedigree) of Branches of the Gregg, Stuart, Robertson, Dobbs and Allied Families (R. L. Bryan Company, 1975), 398; “G-P Holly Hill Cutbacks Due to Separate Ills,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), July 1, 1984, 1-D.
2. 2. For an insightful overview and assessment of the Southern economy since the Civil War, see Peter A. Coclanis, “More Pricks than Kicks: The Southern Economy in the Long Twentieth Century,” Study the South (2020), https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/more-pricks-than-kicks/. The early years of industrial forestry in the South Atlantic Coastal Plain are described in Howard A. Hanlon, The Bull-Hunchers (McClain Printing Co., 1970), 225–318. See also Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193, 198, 238–44; Lawrence S. Early, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 159–62.
3. 3. Fritz Vandover, “‘We Had to Learn What We Might Practice’: The Yale University School of Forestry and Southern Lumber Companies in the Development of Forestry on Private Lands in the Early Twentieth Century” (master’s thesis, Washington University, 2002), 26–27, 33–35; Early, Looking for Longleaf, 124, 155–58; Mark Kinzer, Nature’s Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 35–36;
4. 4. Hanlon, The Bull-Hunchers, 231–32, 238; Mason C. Carter, Robert C. Kellison, and R. Scott Wallinger, Forestry in the U.S. South: A History (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), ch. 12.
5. 5. “W. J. Colvin, 78, Lumberman, Dies,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, March 29, 1965; “Holly Hill Businessman L. E. Miller Sr. Dies,” The State (Columbia, SC), November 18, 1974, 8-A; “More than 400 Persons Attend Testimonial Dinner,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), November 21, 1971, 1-C.
6. 6. “Good Highways and Trucks Revolutionize Lumber Trade,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, September 1, 1935, 2-B; “Wee Hat Shoppe Receives Charter,” The State (Columbia, SC), September 1, 1927, 10.
7. 7. “Good Highways and Trucks Revolutionize Lumber Trade,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, September 1, 1935, 2-B; “Installing New Planing Mill,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), January 14, 1928, 8.
8. 8. “Mill at Denmark Sold,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, May 19, 1933, 12; “Good Highways and Trucks Revolutionize Lumber Trade,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, September 1, 1935, 2-B; “Denmark Served with 3 Rail Lines,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, December 2, 1941, 12-F.
9. 9. “Good Highways and Trucks Revolutionize Lumber Trade,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, September 1, 1935, 2-B; “Mill Doubles Shifts,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, July 15, 1935, 3; [Advertisement], The State (Columbia, SC), October 29, 1936, 7; Mark Kinzer, A Partial Chain of Title Covering the Principal Tracts in Congaree National Park, unpublished report to the National Park Service, 2026; “Holly Hill Page 146 →Lumber Company Employs 625 at Four Plants,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 25, 1937, section 7, 1, 3.
10. 10. “Settlement of Big Timber Suit,” Charleston (SC) Evening Post, June 26, 1937, 7; “Big Timber Suit Finally Settled,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, June 27, 1937, 12; “Building Plant in Carolina,” Morgan City (LA)Daily Review, July 2, 1927, 6; “Chapman-Storm Lumber Corporation at Holly Hill is in Full Swing,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), May 26, 1928, 1.
11. 11. Orangeburg County Deed Book 94, 506, and Deed Book 101, 371; “Holly Hill Lumber Company Employs 625 at Four Plants,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 25, 1937, section 7, 1, 3; “Lumber Mill Bought by Holly Hill Firm,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, October 11, 1937, 9; “Holly Hill Plant to Finish Cypress,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, August 26, 1938, 9; “Project Expected to Bring Rapid Growth to Holly Hill,” Charleston (SC) Evening Post, December 2, 1941, 7-G; “Some Interesting Historical Facts about Holly Hill,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), October 16, 1942, 12; “Holly Hill is One of Area’s Leading Towns,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), January 22, 1961, 1 and 2-B.
12. 12. Timberland Appraisals Lands of Holly Hill Lumber Company, 1961, Clemson University Libraries Special Collections and Archives, Record Group 3.1: Liberty Life Insurance Company Legal Department Records, 1912–1981; Richland County Deed Book D466, 809; “Georgia-Pacific Acquires Holly Hill Lumber Co.,” The State (Columbia, SC), March 13, 1981, 1-C.
13. 13. Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 132–59; Fred E. Ames, “A Report on Loblolly Pine Lumbering in South Carolina” (master’s thesis, Yale University, 1906), 51–53; Robert McAlister, The Lumber Boom of Coastal South Carolina (The History Press, 2013), 67–79.
14. 14. Advertisement, Charleston (SC) Evening Post, August 14, 1950, 8-B.
15. 15. Kinzer, A Partial Chain of Title Covering the Principal Tracts in Congaree National Park; “Sawmill Left Area Ghost Town,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), May 7, 1970, 9; “Smaller Steam Locomotives Take to Depths of Forest,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, September 8, 1952, 12; Hanlon, The Bull-Hunchers, 253–54, plate following p. 232.
16. 16. Wilbur Mattoon, The Southern Cypress, US Department of Agriculture, Bulletin no. 272 (US Government Printing Office, 1915), 33.
17. 17. “Good Highways and Trucks Revolutionize Lumber Trade,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, September 1, 1935, 2-B; “Most of Santee Timber is Sold,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, December 20, 1940, 7; “Santee Land Work Nears End; Payroll Cited,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, February 26, 1941, 11; “Holly Hill Lumber Co. Boon to Tree Planting,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 16, 1975, 1-B; Hearing on H.R. 11891 and H.R. 12111, April 29, 1976, 67–70 (statement of Martin C. Colvin).
18. 18. [Advertisement seeking logs for Holly Hill Lumber Company mills], Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), November 22, 1951, 8; “Kingville: Richland County’s Ghost Town,” Columbia (SC) Record, November 6, 1958, 1-B; Kinzer, Nature’s Return, 170; Timberland Appraisals Lands of Holly Hill Lumber Company, 1961, Clemson University Libraries Special Collections and Archives, Record Group 3.1: Liberty Life Insurance Company Legal Department Records, 1912–1981; Kinzer, A Partial Page 147 →Chain of Title Covering the Principal Tracts in Congaree National Park; “Not 300, but We Are 43 Years Old” [Advertisement by Holly Hill Lumber Company], The State (Columbia, SC), tricentennial ed., April 5, 1970, 7.
19. 19. “Large Lumber Cargo is Loaded for West Indies,” Charleston (SC) Evening Post, April 18, 1961, 11; “$1.5 Million Lumber Mill to Locate Near Walterboro,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, January 26, 1969, 1; “New Lumber Business Coming to Walterboro,” Walterboro (SC) Press and Standard, January 30, 1969, 1
20. 20. “On the Waterfront,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, May 16, 1969, 8; “Holly Hill Lumber Co. Announces Expansion,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), January 26, 1969, 10.
21. 21. “Holly Hill to Get Plywood Plant,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), July 1, 1971, 1; “Holly Hill Lumber Firm Expands,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, July 28, 1972, 5-C; “First Plywood Shipment Leaves Holly Hill Plant,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), July 26, 1972, 15.
22. 22. Holly Hill Firm Plans Expansion by $20 million,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), November 25, 1973, 1, 6; “Prospective Employees Being Trained: Fiberboard Plant,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), July 6, 1975, 6; “Industry Profile: Georgia-Pacific,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), October 13, 1985, 14.
23. 23. “Holly Hill Business, Church Figure Dies,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), November 18, 1974, 1; “Holly Hill Building Portland Cement Plant,” Columbia (SC) Record, June 1, 1965, 11-A; “M. C. Colvin Elected Chairman of Board,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), May 11, 1975, 10-B; “Holly Hill Man Honored at Houston,”Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), October 25, 1967, 12.
24. 24. James L. Howard and Shaobo Lang, “U.S. Timber Production, Trade, Consumption, and Price Statistics,” Research Paper FPL–RP–701 (USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, July 2019), 1; Carter, Kellison, and Wallinger, Forestry in the U.S. South: A History, ch. 8 (quotation).
25. 25. “Holly Hill Man Proposes Resource Plans,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), April 2, 1969, 6; “Forestry Industry Uneasy,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), March 25, 1973, 1-B; “Holly Hill Co. Gets Certificate,” June 6, 1957, 12; “Tree Farms Beneficial in More than One Way,”Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), September 2, 1971, 4; “Holly Hill Lumber Co. Boon to Tree Planting,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 16, 1975, 1-B.
26. 26. Hearing on S. 3224, S. 3225, and S. 3699 (July 20–21, 1972), 39–41; see also “Strict ‘Preservation’ Opposed,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), July 24, 1972, 3.
27. 27. Sierra Club (Bachman Group), An Introduction to the Swamp Systems of the Congaree, Wateree, and Santee Rivers in South Carolina, typescript report, 1974; “Congaree Swamp has Shaky Future,” The State (Columbia, SC), January 5, 1975, 1-B; Hearing on H.R. 11891 and H.R. 12111, April 29, 1976, 67–70 (statement of Martin C. Colvin); “Group Charges Congaree Swamp facts ‘Distorted,’” The State (Columbia, SC), May 2, 1975, 19-B (“150 years”).
28. 28. “Economic Ax Lays Loggers Low,” Greenville (SC) News, April 23, 1980, 9-B; “Lumber Company Forced to Lay Off 350,” The State, April 22, 1980, 1-B (quotations); “Layoffs Hitting Holly Hill Hard,” Columbia (SC) Record, April 22, 1980, 5-C; “S.C. Plants Announce Layoffs,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, April 23, 1980, 4.
29. 29. Page 148 →“Lumber Company Forced to Lay Off 350,” The State (Columbia, SC), April 22, 1980, 1-B (quotations).
30. 30. “Georgia-Pacific Acquires Holly Hill Lumber Co.,” The State (Columbia, SC), March 13, 1981, 1-C; “Georgia-Pacific Corp. Acquires Holly Hill Lumber Co. for Stock,” Columbia (SC) Record, March 13, 1981, 6-D; “After the Lean Times,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), May 8, 1983, 3-D; “Good Highways and Trucks Revolutionize Lumber Trade,” Charleston (SC) News and Courier, September 1, 1935, 2-B.
31. 31. “Georgia Pacific Closes Holly Hill Lumber Co. Purchase,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), March 14, 1981, 1; “Georgia-Pacific Acquires Holly Hill Lumber Co.,” The State (Columbia, SC), March 13, 1981, 1-C; “Industry Profile: Georgia-Pacific,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), October 13, 1985, 14; “After the Lean Times,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), May 8, 1983, 3-D.
32. 32. “Wood Industry Grows Despite Recession,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), June 7, 1982, 4-B; “Former Lumber Company Officials to Open New Plant,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), September 10, 1981, 1; “Industry Profile: Holly Hill Forest Industries, Inc.,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), September 29, 1985, 2-D.
33. 33. “Holly Hill Lumber Plant Lays Off 60,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), August 4, 1983, 1; “After the Lean Times,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), May 8, 1983, 3-D; “G-P Holly Hill Cutbacks Due to Separate Ills,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), July 1, 1984, 1-D.
34. 34. Richland County Deed Book 2175, 3702; Carter, Kellison, and Wallinger, Forestry in the U.S. South, chs. 8, 12.
35. 35. Carter, Kellison, and Wallinger, Forestry in the U.S. South, chs. 8, 12, 13; John A. Stanturf et al., “Innovation and Forest Industry: Domesticating the Pine Forests of the Southern United States, 1920–1999,” Forest Policy and Economics 5 (2003): 407–19; “Canadian Imports Hurt U.S. Lumber Industry,” Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), December 15, 1985, 1; “SC’s $23B Timber Industry is on its Knees as Demand Evaporates,” Charleston Post and Courier (electronic edition), January 15, 2025; “Paper Giant’s Exit Stirs Questions in Savannah,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 7, 2025, A-13.