Schumata Brown was born and raised in Maysville, North Carolina. As a child, he loved the town’s tight-knit community. It’s an aspect of the town he still loves today.
In 2016, he took a job as Maysville town manager, having already served as a town commissioner and mayor pro tem.
Brown arrived at his new job after two decades in the private sector at a company that was going to go public. He had been traveling to boat shows and working with yachts. When he started as town manager, the town had $5,000 in the bank.
Since then, Brown and his team have worked to change things for both the town and its future. For his leadership and his dedication to Maysville and all of rural North Carolina, he recently received the Rural Leader of the Year Award at the NC Rural Center’s 2026 Rural Summit.
“One of my favorite quotes from the Bible is, ‘To whom much is given, much is required.’ And I was given this opportunity, so I knew it was a lot required out of me.”
Schumata Brown
Stepping Up to a New Career Direction
Part of the reason he made the shift to local government was being out in the community coaching his sons’ sports teams. (Brown and his wife have three sons.) Those experiences led some town leaders to ask if he might like to run for a government position. Brown ran for a seat on the town’s board of commissioners and became even more involved with the community.
Calling himself “a big faith-based guy,” he points his call to leadership back toward what he learned from his pastors and the Bible. “One of my favorite quotes from the Bible is, ‘To whom much is given, much is required.’ And I was given this opportunity, so I knew it was a lot required out of me.”
Another part of this shift was learning about the building blocks of economic development, which he learned as a participant in the Rural Center’s Rural Economic Development Institute. He heard about REDI, a leadership training held once a year, from former Maysville Commissioner Dan Ryan, also an alumnus. Brown is a 2014 REDI graduate. Since then, the town of Maysville has had a REDI graduate almost every year.
He says that over time, Maysville had become a breeding ground for town managers. They were “going through town managers, graduating, padding their resumes, leaving. And, hey, we never had any stability.” So when the last town manager left, he thought, “I might have this wild idea to apply for the town manager job.”
It was a job that meant more to him than padding his resume. Additionally, in 2024, he ran for and won, a seat on the Jones County Board of Education and is now chairman of the board.
He says the decisions he makes about Maysville aren’t just professional. They’re personal.
“My kids stay here, my grandkids. My dad stays one house down. My mom stays one house down on the other side. My aunt next door, a cousin, you know, two doors down.” He continues, “If I do anything detrimental, I’m not only getting it at the grocery store, I’m getting it from family members, right? Church members. So, it’s a little different for me, right? I go to church here, I go to the grocery store, I go to the gas station, the parks. So, it ain’t like I’m an outsider.”
“I always say that’s been the best thing that I have done was change that sign and change that logo. And again, with changing that sign, I say, I go back to, I changed the mindsets of the folks. We are not just little old Maysville… We are more than a mere passage to the beach.”
Schumata Brown
Shifting a Logo to Shift a Mindset
Maysville is a town of just under 1,000 residents. Given its location at the intersection of US Highway 17 and NC Highway 58, the town’s sign used to read “A Passage to the Beach.” Schumata knew there was more to the town and worked to change its slogan to “Naturally welcoming.”
This pivot helped re-envision a mindset in Maysville.
Brown says this shift in what Maysville can be has brought positive changes: “It don’t take these big changes. It’s just this one ordinary small change that can create big change, right?”
And goes on to add, “I always say that’s been the best thing that I have done was change that sign and change that logo. And again, with changing that sign, I say, I go back to, I changed the mindsets of the folks. We are not just little old Maysville. We’re just not old. This is just Maysville. We’re not a passage to the beach. We are more than a mere passage to the beach.”
In introducing a new logo, he says, “I think that changed the mindset of the folks that we can be naturally welcoming. We could be a great community even though we’re a small community. We’re going to be one of the best small communities in North Carolina.”
Embracing New Directions for the Future
An ecotourism program at Appalachian State University helped the town think differently about its location, too. It sits right next to the Croatan National Forest with 160,000 acres of coastal forest that includes lakes and opportunities for camping, fishing, hiking, and more.
Embracing ecotourism allowed the town to think about different marketing strategies.
“Let’s market the natural resources that nobody ever thought about. You know, most people that are prone to natural resources, they pull Maysville up,” he says. “’Wait a minute, y’all in the middle of the Croatan Forest?’ ‘Right, correct.’ ‘Y’all got rivers, y’all got lakes.’ Yeah, we want to market that.”
Along with the forest, there are also dark sky spots that allow tourists to come in and camp in places where they can see more stars than they might be able to at home. This meant another shift in how people in the town thought about where they live, he says, noting how it’s like asking someone who lives near the beach if they go there all the time, then finding out they don’t because they’re so used to it being right there.
But ecotourism is just part of what Brown and the town have planned for the town’s future.
In the past, the town may have put Band-Aids on things instead of preparing the town for what’s to come, he says.
Brown is planning “better economic development, better housing, better business is for the people to shop at and spend their money.”
He mentions a UNC School of Government study that found that Jones County spends $20 million a year outside of Jones County. With that information in hand, he says the town is working on how to keep more Jones County money in Jones County.
While he can’t remember where the original quote came from, he says he “just told my board our job for the future right now is to plant trees to create shade for others to sit under. And that means leaving it better for tomorrow, you know, than today. We came in and found out that we wasn’t preparing for the future. You know what I mean? We wasn’t ready to create that shade.”
But now, through the work of Schumata and the team in Maysville, they’re staying busy planting trees.