brierwood articles

On October 10, 1967, Bennie Brooks Ward and Jamie B. Ward signed the deed that gave the land now known as Brierwood a new purpose. The sellers were two timber concerns, Cape Fear Wood Corporation and Waccamaw Lumber Corporation, and what they conveyed was exactly what their names suggest: working pine woods on the edge of Shallotte.

Dr. Ward, known as Ben to his friends and patients, was a general practitioner who cared for the Shallotte area for decades. He had an idea that was unusual for a small Brunswick County town in the 1960s. He wanted Shallotte to have a golf course of its own.

He first looked for partners. The community's records say he approached the Town and a number of individuals about investing in the project. When that support did not materialize, he went ahead on his own and entered the development phase as the sole developer.

Shallotte in 1967 was a small town on U.S. 17, incorporated in 1899 and named for the river that runs through it. Wilmington lay about 33 miles to the northeast and Myrtle Beach about 38 miles to the southwest. The coastal golf boom that would eventually line the Grand Strand with courses was still in its early years, and a golf community in the pines outside Shallotte was a genuine gamble.

The land would take shape over the next eight years: a corporation in 1969, restrictive covenants the same month, the first residential map that spring, the first nine holes by the end of the year, and a second nine in the mid-1970s. All of it traces back to this one October deed.

Fifty years later, on October 24, 2017, the Town of Shallotte issued a proclamation honoring the anniversary of Brierwood's beginnings. In the autumn of 1967, though, it was simply a doctor, a deed and a stand of pines.