COLUMN ONE : Pressures Reshape a Backwater : Woods give way to tire stores as growth overtakes a rural South Carolina county. Tourism now defines the quality of life, and problems accumulate.

Environmental change--from polluted streams to congested highways and overdeveloped land--is affecting the quality of life across the nation. Such change is gradual and often goes unnoticed while it happens.

To measure how various areas have been affected over the decades, The Times dispatched reporters to the places where they grew up. This occasional series of articles examines how our hometown environments have been altered--for better or for worse.

Farmer James Mishoe does not have time to change out of his Sunday suit and tie before he drives his pickup the 12 miles north from Salem African Methodist Episcopal Church to this small town.

“Got to work every day,” he says, unloading turnips, collards and sweet potatoes at his produce stand in the shade of a tall oak tree in the heart of Conway’s black community.

Mishoe, 59, is on the board of stewards at Salem Church in the town of Bucksport, but the troubles he has seen would test the faith of even a presiding elder.

His wife’s failing health, the end of his family’s tradition of tobacco farming, the threat of foreclosure on his property and a fire at his farmhouse in 1975 have all transformed his way of life.

But, in a way, Mishoe is lucky. He has made a living selling produce since the decline of the tobacco market of the 1970s. But now he is intimately bound to another habit-forming, some say addicting, pursuit.

Tourists.

After unloading part of his produce and leaving his youngest son, Roger, at the cash register, Mishoe will drive 14 more miles southeast on Highway 501 to Myrtle Beach, for his livelihood is now tied to how much fresh produce he can sell from his truck directly to restaurants catering to the tourist trade there.

Mishoe moved to Conway while trying to find money to rebuild his farmhouse. Few things are the same in Conway, he says, since tourism came.

He’s right. I know; I was raised here.

Conway is a little town in the eastern part of South Carolina. Its shift from Southern rural backwater to Yankee tourist attraction has begun to put pressure on its environment. Developers are bulldozing surrounding forests and farmlands for commercial and residential development, pleasure boaters are polluting nearby rivers, and population growth--including many Northern retirees--is causing unease in an area unused to urban congestion.

Perhaps more subtly, the region’s old rural, laissez-faire attitudes, which didn’t see much wrong with burning trash in the back yard, dumping liquid waste in the ground or filling in the wetlands that channel storm runoff, are under serious challenge today. And government, so far, has seemed unable to develop the infrastructure--such things as sewers and roads--quickly enough to support the growth.

Conway, population 13,576, is the seat of Horry County (pronounced Oh-REE), population 137,989. The county is shaped like a fat slice of sweet potato pie and is part of the Pee Dee River Basin, an area of nearly 7,700 square miles, about one-fourth of the state.

Six rivers crisscross the basin like veins and arteries on the back of a hand. These rivers generally flow southeast, emptying 10.5 billion gallons of water a day into the Atlantic Ocean. One of the rivers, the Waccamaw, meanders slowly past downtown Conway.

When Hurricane Hugo came ashore in South Carolina last September, the Waccamaw briefly flooded its banks. “There was also an awful lot of debris in the streets,” said Conway city planner Steve Tanner. But there was little permanent damage and only a few injuries, caused by downed electrical wires.

“A mugging in downtown Conway would be a major event,” said Bill Keeling, director of the county museum on Main Street at the edge of downtown.

Huge oak trees shade narrow, quiet streets throughout Conway. Such scenes appear on brochures now to attract tourists, residents and businesses. “Anybody threatens to cut one branch off an oak tree, you get the whole town up in arms,” said Evelyn Snyder, 82, one of the town’s unofficial historians.

The town’s black community, where I lived, built its churches and barber shops on a street ironically named Race Path and educated its children at a high school ironically named after a Boston carpetbagger. The iron web of segregation forced the black community (Conway is about 34% black) to shape itself around care and concern of its members, one for the other.

I remember that tobacco also shaped the black community. Attendance at the all-black Whittemore High School would drop precipitously every tobacco-harvesting season. The planters demanded child labor to raise the crop out of the sandy gray soil and into the curing sheds. Desperately poor parents worked the fields beside their children.

No more.

“One time, boys made $20 a day cropping tobacco. What tobacco field can you crop today?” asked Eutrelia P. Dozier, another local historian and librarian at Whittemore, now restructured and renamed West Conway Middle School. She is at the same school, still the librarian, as she has been since 1954.

Says farmer Mishoe: “When I came home (from military service) in 1960 and went to the farm, I sold tobacco for 75 cents a pound. At that time, fertilizer was running a $1 1/2 for 100 pounds, or $3 for 200 pounds. Then, in 1979, I sold tobacco for 75 cents a pound, and fertilizer was $6 or $10 for 100 pounds.”

He gave up in 1981. “Tobacco farming? That’s out.”

Downtown, the tractors and pickup trucks around which people used to gather and talk have been replaced by cars just passing through on their way to Coastal Mall, near the northern edge of town.

Now, private and public agencies have started a project called Main Street U.S.A. to revitalize downtown and to draw tourists by highlighting its “small-town” atmosphere.

Last May 17, Mayor Ike G. Long Jr. mounted a bulldozer near downtown where the Waccamaw River flows, tore a plug of dirt from a temporary earthen dam and water from the river rushed into the town’s 71-boat marina to mark its official opening. The marina is part of a planned 35 1/2-acre riverfront development with shops, restaurants, condominiums, office complexes and a boardwalk.

Travel-related spending in Horry County for 1987 was $1.4 billion, according to the U.S. Travel Data Center, far larger than any other county in the state.

The same year, agriculture in the county generated only $90 million in expenditures, said Jack Hutchinson of the South Carolina development board, which is responsible for bringing new industry and business to the state.

Myrtle Beach, where Mishoe sells much of his produce, and Conway began to interest tourists and retirees when the gasoline crisis hit in the 1970s.

Then, people from the North heading to Florida, their gas tanks running low, began to notice South Carolina, Hutchinson said.

Tourism and the growth it has brought have compelled Conway’s officials to focus on the natural wetlands in the riverfront district between downtown and the Waccamaw River. These areas help protect the town’s ecosystem, city planner Tanner said.

“Cars park in parking lots, trucks park in parking lots, rain comes and the runoff goes into the Waccamaw River. . . . Well, if we route drainage through the wetlands, it will act as a filtering system for the pollutants, before it gets to the river. . . . The water quality of the Waccamaw probably will be one of the biggest items that will . . . determine the growth of Conway,” he said.

There are other problems.

“Boat owners are horrendous polluters,” said Robert Windhager, treasurer of a local chapter of the Sierra Club. “They toss shoes, paper, plastic plates” into the Waccamaw, “not to mention the gas and oil spills” from their boat engines, which threaten local aquaculture, he said.

Such problems are not new to the area. Although Conway itself has had zoning laws for years, “Horry County didn’t have zoning laws until October, 1988,” Tanner said. The result? “Around somebody’s house you get (an animal) pound on one side and an auto repair shop on the other, and the well water starts tasting funny and the people get sick,” he said.

Also, “We’ll probably be 20 years behind on river and wetlands laws. ‘Let’s let in all the developers and then we’ll write a (water protection) law that nobody likes,’ ” he mused.

Meanwhile, the town grows. “In 1980, the census showed Conway with 10,240 people,” Mayor Long said. “They say that by the year 2005 Conway, and . . . a 3-mile radius around Conway, will have 65,000 people. . . . We’re annexing property coming and going.”

Retired people moving south find a slower pace and a lower cost of living here, Long said. Upscale joggers in the newer Kingston Lake residential section of town run along tree-shaded roads near two-story brick homes with wide lawns.

But, not far away, mobile home salesmen at “independent living centers” sell “double-wides” to the less-well-heeled. “Your New Home--$11,600,” one sign says. That’s the selling price, not the down payment.

Some Areas Resist

Although much of downtown Conway has resisted many of the changes, other areas have not.

“You used to be able to drive 501 all the way to Myrtle Beach and see nothing but woods,” said Reggie Daves of the local Audubon Society. “You can’t do that anymore. Now you see tire stores, motorcycle shops . . . food places, filling stations, golf courses.”

Farmers not in the path of development are caught between low land values, payments on the mortgage and equipment and the temptation to sell to developers, said Draxal Strickland, organizer of the local chapter of the United Farmers Organization.

Mayor Long adds: “A farmer today could do better if he runs water and sewer lines into his property and rents it out as a mobile home park.”

Farmer Mishoe’s produce stand is right across Highway 501 from Cherry Hill Baptist Church, the sanctuary of my youth. On many Sunday mornings after service these days, church-goers try to get to Mishoe’s stand by crossing 501 at the light there while beach-goers are streaming down 501 to the ocean.

“Sometimes the traffic lights change (for crossing 501) for only about three or four seconds,” said Rev. H. H. Singleton, pastor of the church and head of the Conway branch of the NAACP. “People have begun to seek alternative routes, to see if they can go down (to a major intersection) and come back up, you see. And that’s what most of them do.”

Tourism thus shapes Conway’s quality of life, because the traffic on Highway 501 shows how much the town lives in the shadow of Myrtle Beach.

Golf courses, resort hotels, beaches, topless bars, crowding and escalating land values have put the beach city on the map. That bothers a lot of Conway residents.

“Horry County has one of the largest black bear populations in South Carolina; there are predatory birds by the millions, but along that beach it’s like Southern New Jersey,” museum director Keeling said. “I have seen traffic backed up from Myrtle Beach back through Conway to the county line. . . . One solid traffic jam.”

To ease beach traffic jams, the state highway department plans to build a bypass on Highway 501 around Conway. But a possible route is through prime land in private hands, including large tracts owned by International Paper Co.

Mayor Long said that the highway department “doesn’t want to mess up the bears and snakes and alligators and Venus flytraps, so they plan to build a bridge 10 miles long over the woods . . . at a cost of about 10 times more per mile than a regular bridge.”

Trash Problem Grows

As tourism has grown, the trash problem has also become a major concern.

The Horry County landfill is 5 miles southeast of Conway. All non-hazardous waste throughout the county is delivered to the 200-acre site, said Philip Barnhill, county director of waste management. (Hazardous waste is supposed to be shipped 85 miles east to the Pinewood hazardous waste dump in Sumter County.)

One day recently, worn tires were aflame in the tire-dump area in the heart of the landfill, giving off thick, acrid smoke.

Mildred Lewis, a resident of Horseshoe, a community just north of the facility, believes the landfill is the reason for many illnesses in her neighborhood. Recently, she drove through her community of small houses and double-wide mobile homes on dirt yards with tall pines and talked about her neighbors.

“That woman live there? Her grandson is on disability; been on disability for eight years; he ain’t but 18. . . . That lady’s got cancer; so’s her son. . . . That man who used to live there died at 43 from a heart attack.”

A few years ago, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control investigated such health claims and found that the problems weren’t caused by the landfill, according to Barnhill.

The idea that the landfill meets health department standards makes some of the state’s leading environmentalists laugh. At a conference last summer in Columbia, the state capital, they adopted a resolution that said the department’s environmental standards are so low that the agency “should be abolished” if it does not improve.

Some other possible improvements are within reach.

Environmental consultant Marsh suggests that developers should pay higher fees for hidden costs, such as road repair and increased sewer maintenance.

Marsh said that an associate who looked into the state laws came away “horrified at the lax requirements for new roads in South Carolina.”

The Audubon Society’s Reggie Daves says that citizens need to take more independent civic action on environmental issues.

A report commissioned by the county government said that the county must diversify its industry, improve agriculture and aquaculture technology and develop a European trade office, so that there will be less dependence on tourism.

But some solutions are not local. “We’re going to have to change our throwaway society into one that recycles,” said County Administrator M. L. Love. “I don’t think Horry County does any better or worse than any other county in dealing with trash. . . . L.A. has the same problem I have.”

More Crises Loom

Other national solutions are also required, because two major environmental crises are on the horizon. The Pinewood dump in nearby Sumter County, the state’s only site for hazardous wastes, is inadequate and dangerous, said Carol Boykin, vice president of Citizens Asking for a Safe Environment, situated in Sumter city. Some companies may be tempted to dump such wastes illegally in the state’s vast rivers and forests, she said.

And the troubled Savannah River nuclear weapons materials plant in Barnwell County has been shut down partly because of poor handling of its radioactive waste.

Both of those huge facilities are in poor sections of South Carolina counties that do not have much political power, Boykin said. “We’re being treated like Third World nations,” she said: Dangerous materials nobody wants are being dumped in places few have heard of.

Tourism and other transformations have hit Conway hard.

But “tourism itself is not bad,” Keeling concludes. He sees a parallel, though, in the quick-up, quick-down experience of oil boom towns, which have fallen on hard times recently. “Tourists are like oil with legs,” he said. They are a boon for a time, but what if they stop coming?

Changes in Conway that did not hit hard hit fast.

“Thirty-five years ago, people were plowing with mules here,” Keeling said. “My father-in-law can remember riding on riverboats on the Waccamaw River.”

Yet Keeling would not suggest that Conway should be stuck in the 19th Century. Indeed, anyone can see there are plenty of reasons for this small town to move to the 21st Century. But it will take extraordinary leadership, cooperation, sacrifice, creativity and vision for Conway to completely skip the 20th.