Tim Sweeney of Epic Games, with an aerial view of the North Carolina forest. (Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)
Sweeney sold 2,249 acres in McDowell County to the state well below market price, giving up about one-third of the property’s value. That sale completed the Bobs Creek State Natural Area, a protected stretch of foothills forest covering more than 6,000 acres. Foothills Conservancy of North Carolina and the North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation closed the deal on March 30, 2022. The first two phases, covering roughly 3,700 acres, were bought in 2019. The final phase was paid for with a $1.2 million grant from the North Carolina Land and Water Fund and $1,518,399 from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The state legislature authorised Bobs Creek as a natural area in 2017, and Governor Roy Cooper signed the bill.
Andrew Kota, executive director of Foothills Conservancy, thanked him for his effort “to secure the land and patiently own it” until the funding came through. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is best known as the man behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine. In his home state of North Carolina, he is also one of the largest private landowners, and a big piece of that land has passed into public hands. It was the third and final purchase for the project. The discount was only part of the deal. The full purchase took four years across three phases. Dwayne Patterson, director of the state parks division, credited “the foresight and generosity of Mr. Sweeney” for making it possible. Grants from conservationists Fred and Alice Stanback and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation covered the rest.
Sweeney had secured the land earlier and held it for years while the conservancy and state parks officials raised the money to buy it.
Sweeney has been buying land in North Carolina since 2008 and has acquired more than 50,000 acres across 15 counties, much of it through a holding company called 130 of Chatham LLC. The chain runs from South Mountains State Park, which spans more than 20,000 acres, through the roughly 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness and Bobs Creek, to the Pisgah National Forest in the west. In 2021, he gave 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, the largest private land donation in North Carolina’s history. With land prices rising since 2021, he said his focus has moved to putting the large blocks he already owns into permanent conservation.
“Most of my big conservation land purchasing breakthroughs came when the economy was in poor shape and land was prudently priced,” Sweeney said last year. The state manages the site for passive, low-impact recreation. Plans for the land include hiking trails, mountain biking, wildlife watching and scenic viewpoints. Water is a big reason the land was worth saving. The property guards five miles of source streams that feed Muddy Creek, the Catawba River and the Second Broad River, with wide forest buffers along their banks. The Muddy Creek watershed sits on the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s priority list for water quality improvement. The land also holds rare plants and a mix of natural habitats recorded by the state’s Natural Heritage Program. He favours connected tracts over scattered plots, so wildlife can move across large, unbroken stretches of forest. Bobs Creek fills a gap in one such corridor. Sweeney placed Box Creek under a permanent easement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The timing of his purchases has tracked the economy. Bobs Creek shows that plan at work. Land that sat in a billionaire’s private portfolio for years is now set aside for North Carolina’s public, for good. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.