By Miles Layton

COLUMBIA — I know the person who won this big award — Reverend Vickie Woolard.

She’s kind, friendly – one of those people who’ll greet you with a warm greeting at the Scuppernong River Festival. And I like her sermons at Plymouth United Methodist Church.

When I heard through the grapevine that she was recently awarded the Scuppernong River Festival Distinguished Citizen of the Year for Tyrrell County, I thought – this is going to be a good interview because not only does she have deep roots in the Columbia community, certainly Washington County too, but she is a woman of deep faith – so perhaps I serve God’s will by telling Vickie’s story.

These days, we need stories like this that celebrate the best in our character qualities.

With characteristic humility, Woolard had to consider why the Scuppernong River Festival committee had chosen her as its Distinguished Citizen — maybe she is a dachshund lover?

“I have no idea why the committee chose me to receive this award,” Woolard said. “I don’t climb trees, so I’ve never rescued someone’s beloved cat, and while the two dogs we have are both rescues, neither are dachshunds.”

Photo shows the Scuppernong River Festival from October.

The award is presented each year in Columbia and honors lifetime or special service to Tyrrell County. It goes to people with deep local roots who have made major contributions to the community, business and civic life. Woolard, the pastor at Plymouth United Methodist Church, fits that description on the roots alone. She was born in the county, grew up in it, left for a while and came home to stay.

The committee had its reasons, though Woolard has a theory of her own.

“Truth, I suspect it’s because of my work with food ministries in the area,” she said.

That work goes back two decades. “I’ve been involved in working with the Food Bank of the Albemarle to provide food to people with food insecurity for twenty years or more,” Woolard said.

For many of those years, she and other volunteers ran mobile food distributions on the fourth Tuesday of every month. They packaged food, registered families and handed it out to neighbors who had fallen on hard times. Many were senior citizens who had worked all their lives and had no retirement benefits to show for it.

“Times are always hard for people with no security net, for farm laborers, for domestic workers, for housekeepers at the beach, for fishermen,” she said.

What started as a monthly distribution turned into something Woolard describes in the language of her calling.

“That grew into a ministry of presence for us—we didn’t serve other people from our abundance,” she said. “Instead, we served with people.”

The difference shows in what she knows about the people in line. “I’ve come to know their names, their stories, who their children are and where they are, what their dogs’ names are, when their cancer treatments are successful and when they’re not,” Woolard said. She is often at their funerals, too.

The monthly truck eventually gave way to a building. “This mobile distribution led us all to dream of a brick and mortar pantry, and I have been blessed to see that built,” she said.

Woolard said she had little to do with the financial side of the project, but she still works most of the distributions at the Tyrrell County Food Pantry. The numbers are hard to ignore in a county of Tyrrell’s size.

“We serve more than a tenth of the population of Tyrrell County and even some people from our surrounding counties,” she said.

She does not hedge about what the pantry means to her. “I am deeply invested in the Tyrrell County Food Pantry.”

A farm kid from Travis

Woolard was born in Tyrrell County in the days when it had its own hospital, which stood where the Martin-Tyrrell-Washington Health Department is now. She grew up across the river in Travis, on a farm that raised hogs, cows and chickens.

The farm also paid for a good deal of her childhood. “I paid for most of my own clothes in high school and my first brand new bicycle by selling show chickens and livestock show pigs through 4H,” she said.

She is a product of the county’s public schools and graduated from Columbia High School. Her best friend, Alison, was valedictorian. Woolard was salutatorian. She won the James M. Johnston scholarship and left Columbia in 1982 for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a place that took some getting used to.

“There were more people in the three dorms on the quad where I lived than were in all of Columbia, so that first year was an adjustment,” she said.

She later married a soldier who also graduated from Columbia High School. She transferred to Pembroke State University and earned a teaching degree there. The couple moved from Pembroke to Lumberton and then to Wilmington, where her husband was in graduate school. Eventually, they landed back in Columbia.

They raised two daughters. One is a therapist in Durham. The other is in the doctoral program in public history at N.C. State University.

Somewhere in those years, Woolard began homeschooling her children and got involved in the library. She served on boards of trustees and was a founding member and the first president of the local Friends of the Library chapter. Then something else happened.

She “got called into preaching, and wound up where I am today.”

Looking back, she sees a line running through all of it.

“All of my life I’ve been moving toward the place I find myself now, and the work I do now is the culmination of a lifetime of study and calling and passion,” Woolard said.

To explain how that works, she turns to the writer and theologian Frederick Buechner. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” Buechner wrote. Woolard said she has watched it happen.

“I believe this, because I’ve seen it play out in my own life,” she said.

It may help explain why a woman who spent years handing out groceries now serves as a pastor and describes the two jobs as one.

Home

Asked what she likes best about living in Tyrrell County, Woolard answered in three words.

“Tyrrell County is home,” she said.

Her family’s ties to the county’s government run deep. Her mother was Register of Deeds for most of Woolard’s childhood, until she retired. “I grew up with a legacy of love and service to this place,” she said.

The county also holds her memories, and she can still find them when she walks through Columbia.

“I wandered these streets after school just like every other kid who grew up here, and when I walk in town these days, I still see the houses and all the ‘used to bes,’” Woolard said. “I see where the beautiful old people who taught me how to be who I am lived and worked.”

The list goes on. There is the sidewalk where she once wrote her name in wet concrete and got in a good deal of trouble. “I see the sidewalk where I wrote my name in wet concrete and got in so much trouble still is,” she said. There are the houses where she trick-or-treated as a child and where she later took her own girls.

“This is the place that made me who I am, and these are the people who made me who I am,” she said.

Blooming where she is planted

Asked whether God puts people where He wants them for a reason, Woolard did not claim to know the mind of the Almighty, though she has an opinion.

“I expect God does,” she said. “But I also believe, as my mama’s old piano teacher taught her, that we should ‘bloom where we are planted.’”

Asked what she would name as her purpose in Tyrrell County, she began with her vocation.

“As a pastor, I believe that we all have purpose in our lives, that we are here to love God with all our hearts, minds, souls and strengths, and that we are to love others as we love ourselves,” Woolard said.

Then she made it plain that the purpose does not depend on the address.

“I think that’s my purpose wherever I am.”

But she does not take it for granted that her work has kept her in the place where she started.

“But I think it’s a particular gift that I get to love God and to love people in the same place I grew up, in the communities of Columbia and Creswell and Plymouth,” she said.

It is the kind of answer that explains the award better than any list of accomplishments could. Woolard has spent her adult life in the county that raised her, handing out food on fourth Tuesdays, learning the names of the dogs, sitting in the pews at funerals and preaching to people she knew before she ever stood in a pulpit.

She may not know why the committee chose her. By her own account of what she has done, a lot of people in Tyrrell County probably do.