Landowner Stories - Marsh Smith & Hoffman Tract

When a friend who sold real estate and served on Sand Hills Area Land Trust’s board told me of a 46-acre tract next to the Sandhills Game Land, I was interested in preventing it from becoming a go-cart track. But mostly, I wanted to buy land and protect it with a conservation easement. The Sandhills Game Land is a 58,000-acre assemblage of tracts in Richmond, Moore and Scotland counties set aside for hunting and other, compatible forms of outdoor recreation. Along with nearby Fort Bragg and Camp Mackall, it serves as the northern anchor for what remains of the once vast longleaf pine forest that covered the southeastern United States.

In July 1994, my wife and I purchased the 46 acres and the following December, a friend helped me plant containerized longleaf pines in the 20-acre field on the tract. Eighteen months after purchasing the 46 acres, my wife and I put a conservation easement on the tract and SALT accepted the easement. The conservation easement allowed conservation-oriented timber harvesting and provided for a 5-acre farmstead area, sited in a place of our choosing, should we ever desire (or any future owner ever desire) to build a house and barn on the tract.

The tax benefits were great! We didn’t pay any North Carolina income taxes for a year and a half, thanks to North Carolina’s conservation tax credit. And our federal taxes were drastically lower on our 1995 return.

As good as those benefits were for my wife and me, they paled in comparison to the enjoyment our 1-year old daughter took in visiting the tract. In the fall of 1995, she visited the tract for the first time and played with her dog. The next spring she picked blueberries for the first time on the tract. Then there were blackberries and wild plums. Later in the summer there were the wild black cherries. In the fall we climbed trees to pick grapes from the vines hanging from their branches and later we picked persimmons.

These seasonal forays continue to this day. The land has begun to instill in her a love of the outdoors. She has also brought friends to visit and pick berries. At least one friend’s family afterward bought a woodland tract of their own and protected it with a conservation easement.