A land that has stood the test of time

BLADEN COUNTY – In 1727 King George II of Great Britian was not only the King of England, but also ruled over Ireland and was the Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg. In addition, he was also a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire.

He also has a tie with Bladen County when it was still Queensland and in 1735, he deeded a property that sits just off what is now Highway 87 to a family that still occupies the land. This would make them the longest running single family-owned farm in Bladen County. In other words, the property has been in the family for 289 years.

The current owners, Rusty and Patrica (Pat) Patterson still work the land and raise livestock which makes it an actual working farm which it has been for the almost 300 years it’s been in existence.

Through British Rule, American takeover, Civil War, World Wars, global conflicts and pandemics, the property which has been through it all – continues to flow gently in the scheme of the world’s environment.

It almost makes you want to be a fly on the wall as you can almost imagine it telling stories of horse traffic to automobiles, dirt roads to cement highways. From horses, brush harrow, sickle and flail to tractors and combines, it has seen every change.

In 1735, 229 years before Patterson was a glint in his ancestor’s eyes, the land was being secured for him and his wife.

“This is the oldest family farm in Bladen County and North Carolina, to my knowledge,” Patterson said. “It was handed down from the grant from the King of England to John Lord. And then it went from John Lord to Gilmore through marriage, (The Gilmore family) and then from Gilmore to Patterson through marriage. And that’s where we’re at.”

The Pattersons each have children from previous marriages and after meeting on E-Harmony have been together happily for 17 years. Unfortunately, this may be the last generation of Pattersons to live on the property as the children have no interest in picking up the rigors of a farm.

“We met for our first date at Ruby Tuesday in Fayetteville,” Pat Patterson said. “It was the first time we actually met face to face. We just went from there and after dating for seven months, we got married. We just knew.”

Pat grew up in Erwin, North Carolina, which was about 20 miles from Fayetteville and graduated from Erwin High School. She grew up in town and considered herself a city girl. As for her moving to a farm later in life, she was all for it.

“It is great,” she said. “I always wanted to work outside. My longest job after high school was working for a locksmith in Dunn, North Carolina, and when he died, Rusty and I met and now we are together 24 hours a day, and I love it.”

Patterson said that she’s a pro on the tractor and better than anyone else he’s had to work with.

Rusty graduated from Tar Heel High School and then went on to UNC-Wilmington for a few years to be an accountant, but the natural outdoor farm life was too much a part of him to be at a desk the rest of his life. He decided to come back to live on the farm and work with his father again.

“We were out of the tobacco business at that time, but we were mainly planting row crops in corn, soybeans and also had a few cows and hogs. I also came back and got a public job to help support both families. I worked on a break at Westinghouse which was a sheet metal plant in Fayetteville.”

If you use the internet’s generational calendar, there have been between 10 and 11 generations of family that have lived at 20337 NC Highway 87.

According to ncpedia.org, “In the 1700s and early 1800s, farm machinery as we know it today didn’t exist. Most people farmed by hand with wooden hand tools. If you were prosperous enough to have a horse, mule or ox, you could till the soil with a wooden plow. Farming was hard and at times uncertain. Insects, weather, fire, and other events could ruin a year’s provisions.”

After perhaps an ominous start to agriculture in the 1700s, the farming began to improve and multiple crops were being grown. In addition to today’s more popular crops such as hay, sweet potatoes, soybeans, corn, peanuts, cotton, apples, and Christmas trees, Patterson grew up planting and harvest a huge cash crop in tobacco which was popular as far back as pre-American colonies and had been grown before European settlers came by the Eastern North American Tribes.

“I think in the beginning they were substance farmers,” Patterson said. “They all had a milk cow and they had the necessities to live – and that was basically where they started. Tobacco was what kept the farm going for probably 200 years. It was a Burley Tobacco.”

According to Wikipedia, “Burley tobacco is a light air-cured tobacco used primarily for cigarette production. In the United States it is produced in an eight-state belt with approximately 70% produced in Kentucky. Tennessee produces approximately 20%, with smaller amounts produced in Indiana, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.”

“I raised it until 1985,” Patterson said. “And we did it the old-fashioned way. We did it on sticks and it was all by hand labor. We first started early in the spring, probably around January where we planted a tobacco bed. We had to cover it while it was still frosty outside. By Valentine’s Day, a lot of the tobacco is being set out. When I was growing up, we had an allotment, so we couldn’t grow more than 22-23 acres. We usually had a midsummer harvest.”

Farming, even though modern times have changed the face, is still a grueling profession and going against some of the bigger, commercial farms, it has to remain a labor of love to stay focused and vigilant.

“The only way you can get you through your journey is faith,” Patterson said. “With Him all things have been possible.”

As for realizing that he was sitting on a piece of land that was not only historic in nature, but was actually deemed the oldest family-owned farm in North Carolina, he said he never realized that growing up. To him, it was just working the family farm.

“I was probably in my mid-30s before I realized the significance of it,” Patterson said. “When the property was split early, I had cousins who got into the history. I have two who are lawyers in Raleigh and they are a lot more into the genealogy than I am. That’s where I first picked it up.”

Patterson tells the story of one cousin coming to the farm about 40 years ago and in the oldest structure, there was a trunk in the attic.

“I didn’t even know that it was an attic because the boards were laying across,” he said. “In the trunk there was a uniform that belonged to my great-grandfather when he was in the Civil War. His Confederate uniform was in there. I guess it was still in pretty good shape.”

In addition to other Civil War history, Patterson is in possession of a book that had some history of one of the battles at Fort Fisher which was a Confederate fort during the Civil War. Patterson’s grandfather was a captain at that battle and the book recorded his heroism down there.

After the Civil War, Patterson’s grandfather built a house that is still standing on the property today. He lived there, Patterson’s father grew up there and he lived in that home growing up. They believe the house was erected in 1872 although Zillow has it listed as having been built in 1890. Fun fact: Zillow usually lists when the house last sold and what it sold for. Except in the case of any houses on this particular property.

Growing up on the farm was kind of isolated for Patterson, the nearest neighbors being several miles away.

“It was a pretty lonely place when you were a kid,” he said. “Then I moved away and got to really appreciating ‘being lonely,’ so I came back. I knew that this was where I needed to be.”

When he came back, he renamed “loneliness” as “solitude.” Although an avid hunter and fisherman, he didn’t really take up those hobbies until later in life.

“My father was not much of a sportsman,” he said. “he was more of a ‘let’s work.’ So that’s what we did. The tenant farmer and sharecropper that grew up here and who was here for 35 years, would take me fishing occasionally. There’s a pond on the back of the farm where we’d go to.”

An old-school dad, Patterson said his dad was full of wisdom.

“I didn’t retain it all,” he said. “I lost a lot of it along the way. You grow up and realize how little you retained. He had a lot of values and he shared those with me.”

Not having known her father-in-law personally, Pat sees a lot of her husband in the stories of his father.

“He installed the work value in him definitely,” she said. “Because we both love to work. If we couldn’t work, I don’t know what we would do.”

Patterson said that retirement is “not a big draw for him right now.”

“There’s nothing wrong with cuttin’ back some, but not quittin,” he said. “My dad DID give me so much I don’t know it I could even single one out as the most important. I’ll say one thing. He taught me one thing. If you owe a man, you pay him. You hunt him down and you pay him. He taught me that. You don’t make him come ask you, you don’t wait for him to send you a bill. You go pay him.”

He comes from an old-school father, Alton Gilmore “Bozo” Patterson and a working mother, Daphne Patterson. He remembers those traits to this day.

“My mom lived to 94 and she was a worker,” he said. “She would go get the hands in the morning and bring them to the field and come back and hoe peanuts all day and then come home and cook supper, wash clothes and she just worked all the time. She worked hard.”

As far as delving deeper into the genealogy beyond his father and mother, he credits his sister for that.

“It’s important to me, but she knows the details a lot better than I do,” he said. “I think it’s fascinating but I don’t know how the family has held on to it as long as they have. You see so many other families that their land gets split up or the older farmers are getting out without an heir apparent.”

Patterson says matter-of-factly that it will eventually happen to everyone. Another factor that ends a streak of families owning family farms are the environment, the economy and the national events that shape the landscape of farming in general.

“My father went through the depression,” Patterson said. “And he was, to say, ‘thrifty’ would be mild. He died in ’97 and when he died, the equipment we had was in past disrepair. Now, I have bought new equipment since then, but he could talk laborers into working for $25 a day to run older equipment – and that went away. So, I had to upgrade a little bit. My mother told me that when they got married, he had to borrow the money to bury his father. But after that, he got on his feet he was frugal and knew how to make a dollar. He taught me part of that and I learned a lot of things.”

We look at the “frugal” of our old school parents and grandparents and have to wonder what they’d think.

“Our water here is all contaminated from the chemical plant,” Patterson said. “We use county water and we buy bottled water to drink. Now, my father never paid for water and he would roll over right now if he knew I did.”

What fathers don’t have control over is the continuing generations and the heart it takes to take over. As for the Patterson farm, there is no heir apparent and it’s sad to think that the streak may be over with the one day passing of Rusty and Patricia.

When asked about an heir, their Countenance darkens and they shake their heads.

“Unless something changes that I don’t see coming, this is the end,” Patterson said.

When asked if one of his daughters may marry a farmer, Patterson smiles and replies, “Probably not, but we can always hope.”

He also commented that the life of a farmer is not convenient to the next generations and he waxes philosophical in closing by saying, “If you don’t love it, you don’t need to be here.”

The names may one day change, but this land that has been from the beginning of time will continue to meander, accommodate and let her residents call her “home.” Surely, she will miss the Pattersons and their ancestors.

Mark DeLap is a journalist, photographer and the editor and general manager of the Bladen Journal. To email him, send a message to: mdelap@bladenjournal.com