By Miles Layton

PASQUOTANK COUNTY — Thursday, it was raining more than a bit when I met Wade Reid, who farms 450 acres of land around his ancestral two-story white farmhouse deep in the heart of Pasquotank County. 

We talked a bit – a nutria burrowed through a dike, so he was planning to add a few more hours to a long, wet day to plug that hole. He offered me a fig and told me about the crops he grows. Lot of tractors were in his barn.  

Reid is a Christian man – impressed me with his strong faith and values — values that built our communities, state and nation. 

We talked about farming and how he’s worried about losing heritage, same as that of many farming families; property development is changing the landscape in Pasquotank County, certainly Northeastern NC. 

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Stand on Reid’s farm near Durant’s Neck and you can see it: flat fields running out toward Hall’s Creek, cypress trees standing in the low ground, the kind of land that has grown corn and soybeans and alfalfa for as long as anyone in Reid’s family can remember. Which, for Reid, is a very long time.

Reid’s family goes back a long time, deep roots in the community and the soil that his forebears have tended for generations with hand plows and mules, later old tractors, several of which were stored within the large barn where we were talking to escape the rain.

The farm, known as Warriors Ridge, has been in his family since at least 1717. “My tenth great grandfather moved here in the 1630s,” Reid said, standing near the edge of his property. “George Durant, right across the river there. Durant’s Neck. That was my tenth great grandfather. This particular farm where we’re standing has been in my family over 300 years.”

He can’t prove all of it on paper. “Can’t prove it because the Yankees burned all the records,” he said. Many of the farm’s early records were lost when Union troops burned the Pasquotank County Courthouse in 1862, taking with them much of the documentation that would have traced Warriors Ridge back to its founding. What he can point to is still standing, or what’s left of it — the site of his grandfather’s old turpentine distillery, which burned down again a year and a half ago after more than a century.

For Reid, the fight to keep this land is not abstract. It is personal, tied to identity as much as acreage. “My name is not Esau,” he said, invoking the Old Testament figure who traded his inheritance for a meal, “and damn if I am going to sell my birthright for a bowl of porridge.”

He believes farming itself has become a harder inheritance to pass on than land alone. Fewer families have children willing to take up the work, and fewer still have the kind of standing family structure Reid says makes it possible.

“I think what’s happened in this nation in the last fifteen or twenty years is pitiful,” he said.

Reid is candid about how uncertain that future is — for his own family and for farming families like his across the county. Without an heir ready to take over, land that has stayed in a family for generations can vanish within a single lifetime, sold off acre by acre as cities expand and children move away. Reid has watched it happen to other families already. He does not intend to let it happen to his.

The family’s roots reach deeper than the burned courthouse records can prove, however. Reid’s tenth great-grandfather, George Durant, is remembered by historians as one of the earliest English settlers of the Albemarle region and is sometimes called the father of North Carolina. The Durant family Bible, printed in 1599, is preserved today in the collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reid’s lineage also traces to William Reid, who served as governor of North Carolina from 1722 to 1724, and to Thomas Reid, who served under George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

Reid, a biological and agricultural engineer by training who could have made far more money elsewhere, came home instead. He farms roughly 450 acres — 250 on one side of the road, 200 on the other — growing corn, soybeans, barley, oats and alfalfa hay. The alfalfa is a point of quiet pride. “This is the only place you’re going to see alfalfa growing anywhere around here,” he said. “It’s more valuable than almost any other crop you can grow.”

The farmhouse itself carries its own history. The one-story portion was built in 1846. Reid’s grandfather, born in 1879, was hired at 21 by the Foreman Lumber Company to travel to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and escort home a team of championship mules. “I figure that’s where he got the money to build a two-story portion in 1901,” Reid said. The pecan trees planted that same year are still bearing fruit — fifteen hundred pounds or more a year.

A County Under Pressure

What worries Reid now is not the past but what is coming for the land his family has held for three centuries. Pasquotank County, he says, sits almost entirely below the Suffolk Scarp, a geological line running from southern Virginia down through Morehead City. East of it, elevation stays under 20 feet. West of it, the ground rises sharply.

“All of this development is going to do nothing but pollute the rivers, destroy it,” Reid said. He pointed to Queenswood, a subdivision built on roughly 250 acres of land that once drained naturally toward Hall’s Creek. Since it was built, he said, stormwater has backed up onto his own property during tropical storms — once rising as high as his mailbox and up to his house’s foundation.

He recalled a former county commissioner, Jimmy Harris, warning years ago that the infrastructure simply isn’t there to support the growth. “There’s no infrastructure to support the influx of people,” Reid said, repeating Harris’s words. “There are no schools, there are insufficient roads, insufficient water system and insufficient electric grid. Development will make our taxes go up.” He believes the decision shouldn’t be left to developers and county boards alone. “This issue should be put on the ballot,” he said. “Let the residents vote if they want more development and more taxes.”

Reid is “old school,” so he does not spare the school system from that assessment either, calling it inadequate to teach children the values he says farming requires — patience, humility, and a willingness to work with your hands from sunup to dark.

A Life Measured in Hard Falls and Harder Recoveries

Reid’s attachment to the land has been tested by more than encroaching subdivisions. At 13, hunting in the woods behind what is now open farmland, he fell and broke his hip. The local doctor who operated on him, it turned out two decades later, had been drinking from a flask during the surgery. “He botched the operation,” Reid said. “I spent almost two years on crutches.”

It was around that time that a friend’s father — a survivor of the Bataan Death March in World War II — gave Reid a way of thinking about endurance that he still carries. The man had once told a school principal how he made it through: by narrowing his focus to whatever he could still see ahead of him, a rock, a hill, eventually just his own feet. “He said, ‘Life is hard. You make it one step at a time,’” Reid recalled.

Decades later, in 1995, Reid suffered a massive heart attack. He describes what he experienced in the ambulance in vivid, unshaken detail — a sense of rising above his own body, a presence beside him, and a question forming in his mind about each member of his family. “They’ll be all right,” he remembers concluding, one by one — except when he came to his one-year-old son, Sam. “Never an answer,” he said.

At the hospital in Norfolk, disoriented and planning to leave against instructions, Reid says a nurse stopped him at the door. “She said, ‘Mr. Reid, what are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m going home.’ She said, ‘No, you can’t do that. You have to stay here and get better so you can raise your son.’”

Reid also points to a simpler kind of hard labor as proof that perseverance is built, not born — the years he spent as a young man baling hay. Square bales, sold to horse owners, were the hardest work he knew: heavy, dusty, done in the thick heat of a Carolina summer. Round bales, by comparison, asked less of the body but taught the same lesson about showing up day after day for work that has to be done regardless of how a person feels about doing it.

Faith as the Foundation

Reid traces his sense of purpose to a single moment in second grade, when a teacher who had also taught his father a generation earlier called on him to read aloud from the first Psalm in a school play: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.” He practiced it every night with his father for weeks. One evening, he asked his father how a person becomes blessed. The answer was simple: “Do exactly what that says.”

That verse has stayed with him. “There is one source of morality and there’s one source of standards, and that’s the Bible,” Reid said. He credits his parents — his father, who left school in the seventh grade after his own father’s death to support his mother and sisters, and his mother — as the most unselfish people he has ever known. “They made sure my lessons were done. They made sure I behaved,” he said.

Reid, 66, who works the land alongside his 32-year-old son Sam, knows that sacrifice and dedication are needed to preserve their family’s legacy. “I want him to be able to have a good life,” Reid said. “You do it by sacrifice.”

Reid speaks about fatherhood the way he speaks about the Psalm he memorized as a boy — as something inherited and something owed forward. He credits his own parents for giving him the grounding he tries to give Sam now, and he contrasts that with what he has seen in families where no one steps in to look after aging parents or pass down a trade. He points to the fifth of the Ten Commandments — the one, he notes, that comes with a promise attached, to honor a mother and father so that one’s days may be long — as a guide he has tried to live by, staying near his own parents rather than chasing a career or a paycheck elsewhere. It is the same logic, he says, that keeps him in the fields at an age when many farmers have long since retired: sacrifice now so the next generation inherits something worth keeping.

“Good values,” he said, standing near the cypress trees his family has watched grow for decades, “you have to be blessed by God.”