By Miles Layton

EDENTON – Alton Lane, a retired postman and Navy veteran from Happy Home Road, was chosen by acclamation Friday night as the Chowan County Republican Party’s nominee to fill the two-year remainder of Commissioner Chris Evans’ term.

The party’s executive committee met Friday, and its recommendation goes to the Chowan County Board of Commissioners on Monday. According to the meeting agenda, commissioners are expected to receive the nomination, discuss the process for filling the seat, and review background material on Lane and his family. They could vote to appoint him.

Evans, an at-large commissioner, resigned effective Nov. 1 after six years on the board. About two years remain on his term, which is up for election in 2028.

Under N.C. General Statutes 153A-27 and 153A-27.1, the remaining commissioners appoint a replacement, who must belong to the same party as the person who left the seat if that person was elected as a party nominee. Evans is a Republican. Because the seat is at-large, no district residency requirement applies. The board is not required to follow the party’s recommendation. If the board has not filled the vacancy within 60 days, the clerk of Superior Court must make the appointment within 10 days.

Born in 1955, Lane moved to Chowan County in 1991. He built a home on Happy Home Road, where he and his wife, Rakhsheed, raised two sons, Razi and Riaz.

“I’m retired from the post office,” Lane said. He spent four years in the Navy before a 30-year career with the Postal Service, working “everything from letter carrier on the street to being, you know, in management.” He said he did not want to make the Navy a career. “I just did my four years and went home.”

Lane is a member of the Rotary Club and the American Legion and said he has worked with the county election board for several years.

Lane said Razi, the older son, graduated magna cum laude from Hillsdale College, where he was senior class president, and then earned a law degree at Notre Dame. Riaz graduated from West Point with a degree in business management. He is now an Army captain with a wife and child. Both sons were homeschooled, Lane said.

Razi was married two weeks ago. “He married an attorney, so a whole lot of arguments in the house now,” Lane said.

Many county residents know the brothers from their boyhood, Lane said. With their mother, they put on skits at the library and senior center about dinosaurs, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. “A lot of people around know them from that,” he said.

Lane said he met Rakhsheed, a native of India, in 1987, when he was hospitalized at Norfolk General for more than 26 weeks after a horse accident that crushed his left leg. “She was one of my nurses there,” he said. “She was a good nurse, and so I figured I needed a good nurse. I brought her home to take care of me.”

Lane said his work ethic came from a childhood in a family of nine children. His father was a plumber, and Lane said he and a younger brother dug footings and pipelines for a post office built in 1960, when he was 5. “From the time I was big enough to drag a shovel under the house, I was working,” he said.

Asked what he would bring to the board, Lane said he has attended most commission meetings in recent months and is working to understand how the county handles its assets and budget. “I’m willing to learn this,” he said, adding, “I’m willing to put in 100 percent into it.”

The chair asked whether he would run for a full term in 2028. Lane said he had discussed it with his sons. “I would be willing to do that if things work out okay,” he said.

Lane was asked if he could work across the aisle with Democrats on the board while holding to the party’s position on the county’s Confederate monument. Lane said he could.

“I don’t mind working with Democrats, Republicans, Independents, whatever they are,” he said. “I want to always do it on the up.”

On the monument, Lane said he does not believe removing one changes the history behind it. “You can tear a monument down and move it wherever you want to move it. You know, it’s gone. Did it change anything about history? It did not,” he said. He added that leaving it in place “would have been a way for everyone to learn what the history was.”

Copyright 2026 Albemarle Observer. All rights reserved.