A 4,300-acre Baldwin County property described as a hunter’s paradise, with riverside expanses of lowland hardwood forest and upland pine tracts, has sold to an out-of-state buyer for $11 million.

The property, called Fort Pierce, has been described as one of the largest privately held, recreational properties ever to go on the market in Alabama. It lies west and southwest of the Tensaw community, north of Stockton on Ala. 59, with a portion of its western edge bounded by a bend of the Alabama River. It’s about a 40-minute drive from Mobile.

Once a corporate retreat belonging to Scott Paper, it was bought in 2000 by Paul H. Parham II, a prominent business and civic leader in Jackson, Ala. Parham died in 2014 and Tim James Jr., who handled the listing for Jon Kohler & Associates, said it has been on and off the market in the decade since.

James said the buyer in the $11 million sale is an individual from the Northeast. “The buyer is basically an investor from the northeast that has been acquiring properties in the Southeast for the last few years,” he said. “This was their first purchase in Alabama. … They are just looking to diversify their existing business interests up in the northeast. Timberland’s a big focus of theirs.”

James said that as far as he knew, the new owner didn’t have plans for development that would alter the character of the tract.

“You’ve got institutional timberland tracts that sell relatively often that are large scale,” said James. “This is a different asset class, this is a recreational property, recreational timberland property. That it has a river frontage that adds to that recreational component. I mean, it’s the dream, it’s the dream recreational tract because you got a great mix.

“You’ve got 1,700 acres that are bottom land, hardwood along the river that can flood. And then you’ve got 2,600 acres of upland plantation, pine plantation areas, that cannot flood. And this area is just very well known for [having a] really high site index that grows trees really well. Being able to have a place with both bottom land and uplands of this size in Baldwin County, within an hour to the Gulf Coast, is unique to say the least. … I can’t say if it’s the largest recreational tract sale in the last several years, but it is one of the largest in the state for sure.”

The sale price of $11 million was below the one-time asking price of $13 million. However, James said the sale, after a decade on and off the market, illustrates an upward trend.

“I can just say that we are seeing unbelievable changes in the marketplace,” he said. “The recreational land market is as strong as we’ve ever seen it. We continue to set not only price records but volume records and sales year after year, it just keeps going up. The buying pool has expanded nationally and even internationally.

“We represent four Southern states, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina,” he said. “Alabama’s a hot spot. I think we’re the beneficiary of kind of what happened during COVID and then just the political dynamics going on, where you’ve got people getting out of high tax states and high crime and those sorts of things.”