What happened to the massive trees cut down to make way for the Cross Island Parkway?

Editor’s note: This story was first published in the Island Packet on April 19, 1995. In honor of The Island Packet’s 50th anniversary, we are republishing stories from our archive.

Trees felled for highway bridge

With a resounding thunk and a spray of dirt and wood chips, a 100-foot Southern yellow pine toppled to the ground Tuesday to make way for the cross-island highway bridge off Marshland Road.

The pungent smell of pine sap permeated the dusty air as workers with chain saws cut off the 120-year-old tree’s canopy of pine needles, getting it ready for a trip to the Charlestown Naval Yard in Boston. The wood will eventually be used to restore the Navy’s 2,200-ton flagship — the U.S.S. Constitution.

“They took so long to grow and they come down so fast,” said Bea Boyd, a representative of the Museum of Hilton Head, as she watched a man in a backhoe attempt to knock over a 90-year-old live oak that stubbornly resisted the backhoe’s push. “Aren’t you bleeding a little inside?”

The museum of Hilton Head plans to set up an exhibit that will narrate the fate of the massive trees as they make their way from the cleared ruins of a forest on the banks of Broad Creek to the hull of the world’s oldest fully commissioned warship.

Hilton Head Island will supply 21 trees — almost 16 tons of wood — to the effort to restore the 198-year-old ship, which gained renown as “Old Ironside” during the war with England in 1812. The Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort will carry the wood up to Boston in trucks.

“This is really important to be able to get this wood,” said Mark Newell, a research archaeologist with the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. “How many more projects do you imagine will be on the islands of this size? We may never see this much wood again.”

Under a plan worked out with the South Carolina Department of Transportation, Newell can claim any live oaks that stand in the way of a roadway anywhere in South Carolina. In the last two years, he has collected about 20 tons of wood, not including the Hilton Head Island trees, to restore historical ships.

“The South Carolina live oak is one of the most famous woods used by navies all over the world,” Newell said. “Until we started this program, this stuff was just firewood.”

In fact, the rest of the trees felled by workers shaving the land for the cross-island highway bridge will be turned into wood chips and sold.

Most of the pieces Newell wants are curved of Y-shaped, an asset in replacing portions of the ship’s skeleton, said Tom Gioiosa, assistant resident engineer for the Department of Transportation project, during a recent visit to the site.

“They want a Y cut here,” he said, pointing to a rather slim-trunked live oak in the middle of a dense forest off the north side of Broad Creek, near Marshland Road. “It’s like a big slingshot.”

The moss-draped live oak, rising from the acorn-covered earth that will eventually become the $55 million highway’s center line, is one of about five selected by Newell for the restoration projects. Another six live oaks will be cut down for the bridge, but their shape makes them unsuitable for the framework of a ship.

“This one I hate to cut down, because you can see how beautiful it is,” Gioiosa said, peeling away a low-lying wax myrtle to pass by a stately live oak that has made Newell’s list. “That tree would be several tons of wood.”

The live oak, its truck the size of a small garbage dumpster, reaches out to the forest with five or six curving limbs. It is characteristic of the tree, which can grow up to 30 feet in circumference and have a brand spread of over 150 feet.

In fact, the curve and density of the wood is what made the live oak popular with the early Navy shipbuilders, historians said.

For almost a century up until the Civil War, “live-oaking,” or slashing down live oaks for hundreds of U.S. Navy ships, was common among the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, said Hilton Head archaeologist Mike Taylor.

“They would come through and take the live oaks,” Taylor said. “Sometimes they paid for it, sometimes they didn’t.”

The iron-plated ships that grew out of the Civil War eliminated the great need for the wood of the live oak. They later gave way to the steel ships that roam the world’s oceans today.

“It was very hard, dense wood that could take the stress of the ocean travel and rough seas,” said Bob Franklin, a Clomson university forestry and wildlife extension agent. “But our timbering industry in the 17th and 18th century was one more of exploitation rather than conscious management.”

Today, developers have taken the place of shipbuilders as the live oak’s foe.

“I’d say there is less maritime live-oak forest today than we had 50 years ago because there is more development on the coast,” Franklin said. “Everyone wants to go to the coast now.”

Just how many live oaks development has claimed over the years is unclear.

No one keeps an official tally.

At Hilton Head’s Town Hall, natural resources administrator Sally Krebs keeps a computerized list of individual developments and the trees those projects have knocked down, but no total was available.

It is all part of the town’s 8-year-old tree ordinance, which requires developers to produce a tree survey and a plan for replanting trees destroyed by development.

The state Department of Transportation does not have to replant trees it destroys in constructing the six-mile cross-island roadway. The town’s ordinance exempts public projects, golf courses and single-family subdivisions from replacing trees it destroys.

“You have to realize we’re dealing with the highway department,” Krebs said. “They don’t have property to replant trees.”

But Krebs said the group does have to produce a tally of trees to be destroyed by the project, something state highway officials have not completed in the area just north of Broad Creek where a dozen live oaks face the chainsaw.

And that is something local naturalist Todd Ballantine would like to see changed.

“You can’t help but take down some trees when you build a road,” he said. “But you should have to put some back.”

The live oak, in particular, is probably the most valuable tree outside wetlands on the island, drawing more than 90 species to its branches for food, cover and nesting, Ballantine said.

“The live oak is like a natural jungle gym the way its branches reach out and bend and twist in the wind,” Ballantine said. “It makes great nesting for birds.”

The dozen or so live oaks that must come down for the bridge are not “going to cause a large ripple in the force,” Ballantine said. “But we could end up with palmettos and azaleas around here and that doesn’t do anything.”

And the 65-foot-tall bridge over Broad Creek, where construction is scheduled to get under way in December, is just the first section of the six-mile long cross-island road.

Two other sections — one along Palmetto Bay Road and the other from the bridge over Broad Creek to Spanish Wells Road — will probably destroy more live oaks and other trees, admitted Harry Mills, bridge engineer for the transportation department. How many is not clear.

Mills said every effort was being made to save as many trees as possible.

State transportation officials have not yet secured the state and federal regulatory permits to build the roadway, although they are very close to having them in hand. If all goes as planned, the final road, complete with a 50-cent toll booth, will be in place by 1998.

“Safety to the motoring public is paramount,” Mills said. “We have to be sure we have trees far enough off the right of way ... So if we’ve got to remove the trees, lets have a practical use for them, because that wood is so beautiful.”