Mike Gordon helped Archer Lodge grow into a town

ARCHER LODGE — Mike Gordon, the first mayor of Archer Lodge, has witnessed the community’s long arc of growth.

“When I was like 5 or 6 years old, we moved to Archer Lodge,” said Gordon, now 67. “That’s where my father was from, and my mother was from the Epsom community up in Franklin County.”

The Archer Lodge landscape has changed much since then, Gordon said. “In the ’60s and the ’70s, it was different growing up because it was a true farming community,” he said. “There were no subdivisions back then because it was all small farms.”

Traffic, not surprisingly, has changed too.

“When I grew up in Archer Lodge, I could ride my bicycle on the highway from my house to Clayton,” Gordon said. “I could meet maybe three cars. Now it is way different.”

In those long-ago years, Archer Lodge was a small, tight-knit community where folks knew all of their neighbors, Gordon said. “That’s what made it such a good community — they worked together and played together,” he said.

“That community has helped to make Archer Lodge what it is today,” he added.

And what Archer Lodge is today is a full-fledged town of more than 5,000 people.

Discussions about becoming an incorporated town took on a sense of urgency in 2007, when growing towns to the north and west began eying the rural community, Gordon said. “The town managers of Wendell and Clayton got together to look at zoning and ETJs,” he said, referring to extraterritorial jurisdiction. “The lines that they were drawing up when straight through Archer Lodge.”

Had those towns extended their planning jurisdictions, elected leaders in Clayton, Wendell — or both — would have made land-use decisions for Archer Lodge.

A county commissioner in Johnston heard about what Clayton and Wendell were thinking, Gordon said. “The commissioner said, ‘If you have ever thought about being a town, now would be the time,’ ” he recalled. “We took that seriously.”

Gordon and many of his fellow Archer Lodge residents didn’t want Wendell or Clayton deciding their fate, so they formed a committee to explore incorporation.

“At first, it was a lot of door-to-door work,” Gordon said. “We were giving out information on what we were trying to do and why we were trying to do it.”

While sharing information, committee members gathered signatures, Gordon said. “We had a lot of petitions that needed to be signed so that we could move forward to become a town,” he explained.

In 2009, with tentative lines drawn for town borders, the committee put the matter to a referendum of residents, who voted yes. The General Assembly followed suit, passing a bill that created the Town of Archer Lodge.

Two years later, the new town elected its first council and its first mayor, Gordon, who would win reelection four years later.

“We were a town with nothing,” he said. “We’re pretty much starting from scratch. Everything we had at the time fit in a cigar box. It was a checkbook, pencil, notepad, and that was it.”

Archer Lodge didn’t even have a town hall, with the Town Council meeting instead at the Archer Lodge Community Center, Gordon said. “The community center was gracious enough to let us have our meetings in that building,” he said.

As newly elected leaders, Gordon and his fellow council members had a lot to learn.

“At that time, no one had been mayor,” he said. “And luckily, the School of Government has classes … that could teach the new council all that we needed to know.”

Gordon also quizzed his fellow mayors in Johnston County. “You can learn by asking questions of other mayors, but you can’t learn everything,” he said. “Eventually you say, ‘I am mayor. I have a council, and things need to get done.’ ”

Gordon said one of the best pieces of advice he got as mayor was to always be planning for the town’s future. “You got to plan as a town what you can and can’t do because taxpayer dollars are involved,” he said.

And because their tax dollars were involved, Archer Lodge leaders asked residents how the town should spend them, Gordon said. “We sent out surveys, giving a lot of choices and asking for what the community wanted,” he said.

Their answer was a park, which opened earlier this year on Castleberry Road.

Gordon left the mayor’s office in 2018, when he remarried and moved out of town. But in 2019, he went to work for Archer Lodge as its first town administrator.

He’s now retired but still follows the Archer Lodge experiment closely. “I hope that they stick with what we were able to create,” he said. “I hope they can use the same processes that we did from the beginning to continue to see what’s best for Archer Lodge and how best to grow in the interests of its people.”

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