With a population of around 8,500, Clinton is the largest town in Sampson County.
Downtown Clinton is quiet, but welcoming. The county courthouse sits in the middle of the town square, and surrounding streets are dotted with local businesses. Small rectangular banners with yellow-and-orange autumn leaves have been added to lampposts.
Around town, the same care is being taken in the building of businesses, reclamation of ancestral waterways, and discovering new ways to use agricultural land.
Delivering Broadband (and More) to Southeastern North Carolina
Star Communications’ new 42,000-square-foot campus housing its headquarters and ops building is LEED certified and includes conference rooms and a customer drive-thru. Since 1959, Star has evolved from a telephone cooperative into a company that offers much more including customers voice, video, data, hosted and security services.
The company’s mission and motto Donna Bullard, Star’s executive vice president and CEO, says “is to give the rural areas of North Carolina the same amenities of your more urban counterparts, where there is no digital divide, offering telecommunications that are affordable and dependable.”
Star employs 87 people and has customers in five rural North Carolina counties: Bladen, Columbus, Cumberland, Duplin, and Sampson. The company’s 1,458-square-mile-service area is slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island.
To provide in-ground fiber for broadband service, Bullard notes it costs nearly $50,000 a mile. She continues, “There is no business plan at $50 a month to serve approximately two customers in one mile, but that’s what we do and who we are.” It’s a price that continues to rise.
Thanks to funding opportunities, including USDA ReConnect grants, the company has been able to bring more fiber to local households. According to Bullard, they’ve put the funding into the ground to serve their customers, and Star is “almost 100% fiber to the home” across its entire service area.
Bringing Back Access to Ancestral Waterways
Running alongside Star’s former headquarters is the Great Coharie River. That’s where the Great Coharie River Initiative began restoring access to local waterways in 2015 after tribal elders asked Tribal Administrator Greg Jacobs what he was going to do about the river. The Coharie Tribe, the state’s 4th largest tribe, has lived on or near the Great Coharie since the 1700s. Downed trees and other debris had made the river, previously a site of recreation, unpassable.
When Jacobs shared the inquiry with River Director Philip Bell, whom Jacobs calls a Coharie River Legend, Bell said he wanted his grandsons to enjoy the waterway as they once did. They then talked about cleaning up the Great Coharie. “… And I said that if we will just do the same thing that our ancestors did, put our head down, work hard, use what we got, and do what we can, I said the Great Spirit will send the rest,” says Jacobs.
“In the last 10 years, we’ve really seen a cultural awakening and what woke up our tribe was restoring our long forgotten ancestral waterways. When we started being good stewards to our land and our waterways, so many doors opened.”
Watershed Coordinator Kullen Bell
The first year, a small group of volunteers cleared a little over two miles of the river, which has led to additional clean-up efforts. A decade later, debris has been removed from 140 miles of Sampson County waterways with much of the funding from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture Streamflow Rehabilitation Assistance Program and indigenous perspective, direction, and physical oversite from the Coharie Tribe regarding location recommendations and approved operations. During that decade, two 600-year-old dugout canoes have been found on Sampson County waterways. One of the canoes is on display at the Coharie Tribal Center.
The initiative’s work has led to new opportunities, shares Watershed Coordinator Kullen Bell, “in the last 10 years, we’ve really seen a cultural awakening and what woke up our tribe was restoring our long forgotten ancestral waterways. When we started being good stewards to our land and our waterways, so many doors opened.”
Turning Family Farmland Into an Agritourism Adventure
Down the road from the tribal center is Hubb’s Farm, a 65-acre expanse full of play and educational activities. Sampson County leads the state in agricultural sales and has more than 292,000 acres of farmland, roughly the size of Los Angeles. The county has many farms, and also many opportunities for agritourism businesses.
Hubb’s Farm’s holds activities in the spring and summer and has a large festival in the fall. In 2008, Tammy Peterson and her husband John turned a section of Tammy’s family’s land into a space ready for visitors that includes a nature trail, games, farm animals, hayless hypoallergenic hayride, and much more.
Creating new educational activities is a big part of Hubb’s Farm because as Tammy Peterson says, “you can’t spell agritourism C-O-R-N-M-A-Z-E.”
The Petersons are also hog farmers. In order to teach guests about the hog industry, they’ve turned one of their former hog houses into an educational activity area called the Taj MaHog that includes swine-themed mini golf (“the world’s only Pork Putt”) and a play zone with 200 bushels of corn.
The Petersons opened Hubb’s Farm after their son Luke was born. “Starting this allowed [John and I] both to be able to work here on the farm and also have a place for Luke to work,” says Tammy Peterson.
And while the farm does feature a 15-acre corn maze (complete with 3-4 miles of trails), which was the business’s original focus, they’ve expanded over time. Because expansions and opportunities can show up in all kinds of ways.