Once part of the nation’s largest farm, crops still grow in Dare County — surrounded by wildlife refuge

MANNS HARBOR, N.C. — “It’s good land,” said Matt Respass, a lifelong farmer from just south of Plymouth in Washington County.

Respass, 49, recently signed his second three-year lease to farm nearly 339 acres on the Dare County mainland.

“Last year, it was a good growing season, and I had a beautiful crop of corn down there,” he said. He plans to plant the fields, which he leases from Dare County, in the next few weeks.

Corn and soybeans grow on the farmland around Dare County’s landfill in Manns Harbor. The county’s property is now surrounded entirely by the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. But the property, the refuge and most of mainland Dare County were once part of the nation’s largest privately owned farm.

Respass, who comes from a farming family, tends various plots of land over multiple northeastern North Carolina counties. He used to grow tobacco but has shifted with the market — to cotton in 2010, then to peanuts and wheat.

The last few years, he said he has only grown corn and soybeans. He sells his harvests to area mills where he’s “pretty sure” they’re ground into livestock feed.

“You can make a living if you’re real careful,” Respass said of farming.

He said he likes that Dare County’s farmland is laid out in half-mile rows, allowing him to “knock out” a significant amount of work in a day.

He does have to mind the weather, though.

If there are heavy rains for two or three consecutive days, “it will go underwater,” Respass said. “Dry land farmers spend money pumping water on. I spend just as much money pumping water off.”

A series of pumps and ditches — which require maintenance in the winter — keep the land from being constantly inundated, as it once was.

A former marsh, the tract was converted into farmland, likely sometime between the 1970s and mid-80s.

Farming is required by the lease. This keeps land available in case the county’s C&D landfill, which is strictly for construction and demolition materials and is located in the middle of the farmland, ever needs to expand, according to County Manager Bobby Outten.

“The hope was that the beneficial use would prevent that land from going fallow and reverting into wetlands where it couldn’t be used,” Outten said.

The county’s property, like most of the Dare County mainland, was once part of First Colony Farms.

___

Boom and bust

Starting in 1973, First Colony Farms — the name a nod to the first attempted English colony on Roanoke Island, just across the sound from the property’s northeastern limits — included approximately 355,000 acres. It stretched across parts of four northeastern North Carolina counties: Washington, Tyrrell, Hyde and Dare.

The owner, Malcolm P. McLean, had become a millionaire and moved to New York City after selling his Winston-Salem trucking company.

McLean is credited with revolutionizing global commerce by inventing the shipping container in the mid-1950s. For this, the International Maritime Hall of Fame named him “Man of the Century” in 1999.

“Today, it is estimated that 90 percent of the world’s trade moves in the containers,” according to a May 27, 2001, article in The Washington Post that ran two days after McLean’s death at age 87.

Not all McLean’s ideas met such success.

In North Carolina, two investment ideas flopped and ultimately led to him filing for bankruptcy in 1986.

McLean made a $50 million cash investment in 1973 on First Colony Farms, which spanned 55 miles west-to-east, from Roper to the Croatan Sound, according to a May 8, 1974, article in The New York Times.

At the time, some of the land around Roper was being cleared.

McLean planned to raise cattle, run the largest hog-growing operation in the country and produce enough food to sustain the livestock, according to the article.

Outten, who grew up in Plymouth, remembered the grain silos being built while he was in high school. He and a friend applied for summer jobs building the silos some year prior to his 1975 graduation, but “they didn’t hire any new workers while we were looking.”

“The roads are all squares and they aren’t named, and we got lost,” Outten recalled, describing tall crops in the fields obscuring their view. “It took us a while to find our way out.”

Some cattle and sows had arrived on the farm by the spring of 1975.

“The cattle and sows now on hand are the first units toward the farm’s announced goal of raising no less than a million head of pork and 100,000 head of cattle per year by 1980,” according to an April 1975 article in The State, now known as Our State magazine.

“First Colony eventually expects to provide 1,000 jobs, an admirable goal in an area that consistently ranks low in per-capita income,” according to that article.

But concerns with the project were also present.

Environmentalists feared negative impacts of land-clearing on wildlife habitat, namely for black bears, and harm to estuary waters from animal waste and pesticide runoff, according to The New York Times article.

A decade after his purchase, McLean’s operations and the resulting environmental impacts drew comparisons with smaller-scale land-altering efforts two centuries prior.

Josiah Collins, who immigrated from England and established Somerset Plantation near Creswell, forced the Africans he enslaved to dig the Collins Canal in the 1780s and to clear 65,000 acres, according to a March/April 1983 Southern Exposure article titled, “For Peat’s Sake.”

“Now huge tractors do in hours what slaves once did in weeks, and the area around Lake Phelps faces environmental shifts that far surpass those of 200 years ago,” the article said of First Colony Farms.

Deep peat deposits impeded the clearing of portions of the land.

“Peat is the waterlogged mat of partially decomposed vegetation that has gathered for millenia in the delicate, still-mysterious freshwater bogs known as pocosins,” according to the Southern Exposure article.

“Pocosin” is a word from the area’s Indigenous inhabitants, meaning “swamp on a hill.”

First Colony Farms, “after a number of years…conceded that farming and/or growing livestock on deep peat soils was unprofitable, confirming the conclusions of various people during the previous century,” according to the December 1999 Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge Forest Habitat Management Plan.

McLean turned his attention to peat mining those areas. He partnered with a company, Peat Methanol Associates, that had a plan to strip mine for peat and convert it to methanol, which would be sold to boost the octane in gasoline.

About 26,000 acres between Phelps, Pungo and Alligator lakes had received permits for peat mining by the early 1980s, according to the refuge’s habitat management plan.

___

Watermen, farmers and environmentalists defeat outside interests

Significant areas of the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula are now protected because local watermen, farmers and environmentalists succeeded in shutting down the peat mining efforts of the early 1980s by nationally prominent Republicans.

“Peat Methanol Associates was well-connected in Washington and New York power circles, the major investors being influential Republican political figures,” according to “Saving Great Places,” a 2018 book by Glenn Blackburn that the North Carolina Coastal Federation published.

Investors included CIA Director William Casey and Robert Fri, former acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the book.

Peat Methanol Associates planned to mine 120,000 acres in the peninsula.

“The peat fight of 1982-84 was a transformative event,” Blackburn wrote in his book. “It was one of the rare times that ordinary working people working with environmentalists succeeded in defeating a powerful corporation. And it eventually resulted in the establishment of large wildlife refuges.”

Fishermen were upset because the drainage from the cleared land “was having major impacts on Pamlico Sound,” including increased sedimentation and high bacteria levels, according to Todd Miller, who founded the North Carolina Coastal Federation in late 1982.

The release of mercury into the atmosphere and runoff with mercury levels far exceeding state standards was another point of contention, according to the Southern Exposure article.

The proposed peat mining was one of the first issues his organization took up, Miller said.

An April 1983 meeting that took place at Lake Mattamuskeet High School in Hyde County marked its turning point, according to Blackburn’s book.

CBS sent TV crews to the meeting, bringing national scrutiny to the issue, and the school’s gymnasium “was packed to the rafters” with about 650 people, Miller recalled.

“Over the next couple of hours one speaker after another excoriated PMA and the state regulators,” Blackburn wrote. “A waterman yelled that PMA was the biggest welfare case he had ever seen.”

Local farmers and watermen didn’t like the proposed project receiving $500,000 in federal subsidies, Miller said.

Not long after, the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation, formed by Congress, announced it was withdrawing its support, “and everything collapsed,” Miller said. “The project was not economical without the half million federal dollars.”

Meanwhile, the National Wildlife Federation and the Coastal Federation filed lawsuits against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for not protecting wetlands that were being converted to cropland. A federal court’s 1987 decision led to stricter protections, according to Blackburn’s book.

“First Colony Farms and Prudential recognized that tighter enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act meant that they would be unable to continue transforming wetlands into farms, and they decided to sell and donate their land to become a wildlife refuge,” Blackburn wrote.

First Colony Farms began selling some of its Dare County land as early as 1980, land deeds show.

“Any land cleared before these tighter restrictions took place is basically allowed to be continued to be farmed,” Miller said.

Prudential Life Insurance was an investor with First Colony Farms for some of its land tracts, according to Derb Carter, Jr., senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, who was also involved in the fight against peat mining.

Dare County obtained its 836.2 acres — of which, 366 acres is marsh — from Prudential Insurance Company of America on Sept. 15, 1987, according to its special warranty deed.

In 1984, nearly 150,000 acres were acquired for conservation as the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1990, would cover over 100,000 acres, Blackburn wrote.

With rows running perpendicular to the county’s leased farmland, the Alligator River NWR maintains many large tracts of farmland stretching west toward the Alligator River, south of U.S. 64.

The refuge manages about 4,170 acres of cropland that it acquired in 1988 “as croplands, moist-soil units and filter strips,” which provide a diversity of habitats and food for wintering waterfowl, according to Sarah Toner, visitor services manager for the Coastal North Carolina NWR Complex.

Under cooperative farming agreements, area farmers mostly grow corn and soybeans, along with some winter wheat, rice, millet and grain sorghum — and they “leave a percentage of their crop standing for wildlife as rent,” Toner said.

First Colony Farms, the peat mining proposal and related events “put on front and center stage really thinking about the hydrology of the landscape and how much you should alter,” Miller said.

“Everybody talks about nature-based strategies now,” he said. “That was really the start of it.”