Excavation and land clearing across Brunswick County, NC.

US-17 runs the length of Brunswick County from the South Carolina line at Calabash up to the Cape Fear River, and most of the towns we work in here are strung along that corridor. Calabash sits at the SC border. Shallotte is twenty minutes inland on a tidal creek. Southport is at the river mouth where the Cape Fear meets the Atlantic. Leland is the suburban edge of Wilmington across the bridge. The terrain across all four is low coastal plain — flat, sandy, with shallow water tables and a lot of marsh and tidal creek that has to be respected when you put a machine in the dirt.

Brunswick is also where most of southeastern NC’s barrier islands are. Holden Beach, Ocean Isle Beach, Sunset Beach, Oak Island, Bald Head Island — all of those are Brunswick County. We do not work on the islands themselves often (most island lots are too small and access is too restricted for our equipment), but we do a lot of work on the mainland side of the Intracoastal Waterway where the rental homes get built and the driveways and pads get prepared. The Cape Fear River forms the eastern border of the county, and Southport sits at the mouth of it — that part of the county has a maritime character that is structurally different from the inland half.

Most of Brunswick County is within twenty feet of sea level. Water tables are high, the topsoil is sandy and shallow, and the clay layer below it can be hard or soft depending on which side of the county you are on. That combination matters for two things in particular: pond work (high water tables make pond construction either much easier or much harder depending on the year) and septic-related grading (the perc rates here are not what they are inland, and the grading you do around a system has to keep that in mind). We have spent enough time on Brunswick County jobs to know which sub-regions behave which way.

Most coastal Brunswick County work falls inside an Area of Environmental Concern under the state Coastal Area Management Act. That means projects within a certain distance of the shoreline, the estuary, or a public trust water feature need a CAMA minor permit before any dirt gets moved. We do not pull the permits for you — that is between the property owner and the local CAMA office — but we know which sites are likely to need one and we will tell you up front during the site visit so the project does not stall a week into the work. That kind of heads-up is one of the things that makes hiring a contractor familiar with this coast worth more than hiring one based further inland.