Qualla: Carolina Sandhills

Carolina Sandhills: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JustSomeGuy4361, CC BY-SA 4.0. The sand is older than the last ice age and the dunes were made by wind. Between roughly 75,000 and 6,000 years ago, when North America's southeast was colder, drier, and sparsely vegetated, hard winds blew sand sheets and dunes out of Cretaceous river deposits and piled them along the inland edge of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. That belt is the Carolina Sandhills - 10 to 35 miles wide, threading from southern North Carolina across South Carolina into eastern Georgia. Geologists call the sand the Pinehurst Formation. Botanists call what grew on it the longleaf pine ecosystem. People called this land Carolina's Piney Woods. Today, only about one percent of the original longleaf forest remains.

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Image: JustSomeGuy4361 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Carolina Sandhills: Wind and Older Wind

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JustSomeGuy4361, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Pinehurst Formation is Quaternary - geologically yesterday by comparison with what sits underneath it. The sand was sourced from Cretaceous river deposits about 100 million years old, mapped in the Carolinas as the Middendorf Formation. When luminescence dating tells you when...

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Image: JustSomeGuy4361 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Carolina Sandhills: Longleaf and Fire

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JustSomeGuy4361, CC BY-SA 4.0. What grew on sand that thirsty was longleaf pine, Pinus palustris, locked in a partnership with a grass: wiregrass, Aristida stricta. Together they made one of North America's great ecosystems. At its peak the longleaf-wiregrass forest covered roughly 60 percent of the Atlantic a...

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Image: JustSomeGuy4361 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Carolina Sandhills: The Woodpecker and the Tree Frog

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JustSomeGuy4361, CC BY-SA 4.0. More than thirty plant and animal species native to the longleaf ecosystem are now threatened or endangered. The most famous is the red-cockaded woodpecker, Dryobates borealis, a small black-and-white bird that excavates nesting cavities only in living longleaf pines that are 80 ...

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Image: JustSomeGuy4361 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Carolina Sandhills: The Goobers and What Saves What's Left

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wyatt Greene, CC BY-SA 3.0. The people who lived in the Piney Woods during the 1800s were called Goobers - the same name as the peanut, a word that came over from West Africa as nguba. The Sand Hills cottage architectural style, a stripped-down Greek Revival adapted to the sandy soils and pine forests of th...

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Image: Wyatt Greene | CC BY-SA 3.0