Additional land in Beaufort county will now be preserved for both the enjoyment of residents and the compatibility of military operations thanks to a recent conservation easement.
This specific easement will take effect on close to 500 acres of land located near South Wimbee Creek in the area north of Beaufort known as “Bower’s Farm”. It will primarily be used to prevent high-density housing and preserve a mile stretch of Wimbee Creek frontage.
While additional housing is never a bad thing and construction of housing developments is a great way to increase the value of an area as well as promote jobs and economic growth, land in Beaufort County is regularly persevered in this fashion for very good reason. We’ve all heard the ‘Sound of Freedom’ in the jets stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort. Those jets require a clear airspace to perform their training maneuvers, but they also need unobstructed ground areas for landing and takeoff. Any buildings within a certain radius of their airfields creates hazards and restricts their operations. A significant growth in development around an installation may hem in an on-base airfield so much that it is unable to support the missions of its units. Housing developments too close to an installation can be a hassle for residents as well. We all like hearing that ‘Sound of Freedom’ when we’re at the Beaufort Airshow, but it would be more than a little annoying to hear it right above your house if the pilots of MCAS Beaufort are doing night training. It’s for all of these various factors that Beaufort County takes proactive measures to ensure that the land around its military installations are developed (or not) in ways that are compatible with both communities and military missions. In this case of Bower’s Farm and Wimbee Creek, compatible development means preventing high-density housing and preserving the land’s rural beauty.
The decisions that surround easements of this type are made by a program that has existed in Beaufort since 1999 – the Beaufort County Rural and Critical Land Preservation Program. This is a taxpayer-funded initiative that protects a number of locations around the county including working farms, important waterbodies, and passive parkland to ensure public benefits such as cultural and historical preservation and clean drinking water. The program also helps enable the kind of compatible growth that will keep the ‘Sounds of Freedom’ in Beaufort County for the long term and preserve the economic benefits that go hand in hand with those sounds.
The new easement is not flashy and there will be no ribbon cutting to celebrate its achievement. But this, and other land protection initiatives like it all contribute to the unique factors that make Beaufort both a beautiful natural area and a valuable partner for the Department of Defense. As Kate Schaefer of Beaufort’s Open Land Trust stated, “Few other places have the synergy between high natural resource values and increased military and economic value”. With easement and future ones like it, we look forward to that synergy continuing in Beaufort County for many years to come.
