Surveyors to map state park boundaries

New home construction sits on or near a property line in Paris Mountain State Park Wednesday. Staff/ Owen Riley Jr. e-mail this story

That's bad news for people like Frank Folk, who has owned land adjacent to Paris Mountain State Park for more than 40 years. He recently tried to subdivide part of his land, but surveyors couldn't find the pins that marked the border.

It isn't good for the state, either. Development surrounding Paris Mountain, Caesars Head, Jones Gap and Table Rock has increased the risk of damaging public land.

With that in mind, surveyors have stepped in to donate three years of service worth $1 million to define the borders.

Folk hopes that will make his life easier.

"They'll probably have the same problems I had," he said. "Hopefully, I can agree and they can agree on where the line ought to be."

Some of the state's older parks may have surveys more than a century old. Others might be rough estimates, said Phil Gaines, assistant director for the park service.

"Some of the surveys might be: 'The border runs from the old oak tree to behind the big rock,'" he said.

Paris Mountain was donated in 1935 and no surveys have been done in the park since then. Table Rock was donated in the same year and a partial survey was done in 1967, Gaines said.

Gaines said modern surveys haven't been done because it was hard to justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars when the state needed money for maintenance and hiring park rangers, among other expenses.

That shouldn't have mattered, said state Sen. John Matthews, D-Orangeburg, who sits on the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee.

"I knew they didn't know where some of the boundaries were, but I didn't know there were so many," he said. "This is state-owned land. They need to know where the boundaries are. This should have been done in the past."

Some of the borders have never been defined. Most of Caesars Head's 2,200 acres were "undefined" in 1967 when Tom Marchant's family owned it, Marchant said. Much of the border areas of Caesars Head and Table Rock are still marked as "indefinite" on official federal topographical maps.

It will be "productive" to know where the boundaries are, said Marchant who lives in Cliff Ridge, a housing development adjacent to Caesars Head.

"Any problems we've had have been solved amicably," he said. "Anything that we can do to help facilitate (the surveys) so we can continue to be good neighbors will be welcomed."

Members of the South Carolina Society of Professional Land Surveyors will donate the surveying as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. Gov. Mark Sanford said he hopes other associations can come forward with free services to help a cash-strapped state.

While housing already surrounds Paris Mountain, the popular Caesars Head State Park is just now starting to interact with neighbors – people the park service insists are making honest mistakes and not intentionally harming the parks.

Fuzzy boundaries didn't much matter as recently as the 1980s, said Joe Anderson, park manager at Caesars Head.

"Private properties in and around Caesars Head were left natural 20 years ago, but now they want to develop them," he said. "There are areas, especially in remote areas, that we need to know."

Not all of the encroachments are honest mistakes, said Mary Lou Jones, president of the Friends of Paris Mountain State Park. The group has tried to locate survey pins in the past, but has had little luck.

"Sometimes, it's in the developers' advantage to 'accidentally' cut down a tree," she said. "I think some of that has happened, but most of it is just the pins are lost."

The problems are not limited to land owners. Hikers, hunters and Clemson University scientists also have run into problems in recent years. Areas of the parks that people might think go on for acres may end after a few feet, meaning hikers and other visitors could accidentally trample private property.

Some popular hiking trails between Jones Gap and Caesars Head, for example, run through private land, though hikers are unaware because the boundaries are not marked.

At Croft State Park in Spartanburg, the state wanted to open a bow hunt for deer but had trouble establishing the hunt because rangers didn't know exactly where the park ended.

Clemson University biologists trying to document locations of rare plants have wandered among parts of the Department of Natural Resources' Jocassee Gorges property and Table Rock State Park, owned by the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, without knowing who owns the land, said Patrick McMillan, curator of the Clemson herbarium.

"I found some very unique rare plant sites on a ridge up there, and we still don't know who the property owner is. It's in a gray zone between Table Rock State Park and the Jocassee Gorges."

That gray area could be problematic because the plants are protected inside the park, but the Jocassee Gorges is a mixed-use area that could be logged or burned, and offers more public access.

Jason Zacher covers the environment and natural resources. He can be reached at 298-4272.