TLC Acquires Key Tract at Leigh Farm on New Hope Creek

by Lynn Padgett
(from TLC News, August 1995)

At the end of June, TLC took title to a two-acre wedge of dense forest, flourishing poison ivy, mud, and two small houses near the intersection of I-40 and Highway 54. These are the two acres that will link a new park at Leigh Farm to the New Hope Creek Corridor and the Jordan Lake watershed.

No other TLC project has involved so many cooperators (see below), because the vision of a Leigh Farm Park as a southern anchor for the New Hope Corridor appealed to descendants of the Leigh family and attracted diverse private groups and public agencies to make this dream come true.

In contrast to the properties TLC protects for the sake of their distinctive natural landscape features, the Leigh Farm is a “working” landscape – the result of human activities interacting with natural processes. In the 19th century, its 987-acre size made Leigh Farm small for a plantation, large for a farm. Its topography is mostly gentle. The house that Richard Stanford Leigh built for his bride Nancy Ann Carlton in 1834 is charming and unpretentious. The out-buildings are modest: two log cabins once occupied by slave families, a smoke house, corn crib, carriage house, well house, and tiny dairy. An ordinary place – for its time.

But for our time, Leigh Farm is a rare and precious place. Drive slowly down the lane between green walls of forest. Arching branches shade out the hot sky. Emerge into the clearing around the old house and enter the 19th century. The roar of trucks fades to a background hum for crickets and mockingbirds and children playing with a big black dog. Stand still long enough and a lichen on the tulip poplar suddenly reveals itself as a tiny tree frog, perfectly camouflaged.

The sign at the end of the road calls this the "Home Place" of Richard Stanford Leigh. Yet even before farm families of the 19th century cultivated their crops and planted their gardens, native Americans used the rich resources of the bottomlands along the New Hope during their thousands of years of occupation. This site is also a homeplace for many other species who use the New Hope Corridor for access to a wide range of habitats. With Interstate 40 cutting through its original lands, Leigh Farm hasn't entirely escaped the consequences of the urbanization flowing around it. Still, enough remains so that visitors may someday come here to glimpse what it means to live in partnership with a place for a very long time.

Already volunteers and boy scouts have started on the network of trails planned for the Leigh Farm Park. The Master Plan (detail pictured) prepared by Coulter Associates with a grant from the Junior League of Orange and Durham Counties calls for picnic areas, meadows, and passive recreational facilities. Everyone involved knows that this is a place best visited on foot where the sights, sounds and smells of the Piedmont can be experienced directly. Plenty of work remains to turn this into a park, but with many of the key tracts of land successfully acquired, the more tangible, even more gratifying, work can now begin.

Cooperation is the Key

A wide range of private groups and public agencies have cooperated to create a park at Leigh Farm, including the City and County of Durham and the Durham Open Space and Trails Commission, the Junior League of Durham and Orange Counties, Historic Preservation Society of Durham, Preservation North Carolina, New Hope Audubon Society, the State of North Carolina, and the Triangle Land Conservancy. TLC was able to acquire the two-acre tract with a $23,000 matching grant from the Durham Open Space and Trails Commission and generous gifts from a number of other donors including Arbor Realty, the News And Observer Foundation, Becton Dickinson and ClinTrials. TLC’s part in this project would not have been possible without a number of dedicated volunteers: B.B. Olive and Hildegard Ryals were our never tiring leaders; Debbie McCarthy, Ann Duke, Beth Martens, Tom Darden, Bill Bracey, and Bill Mills gave time and valuable advice, Tony Tingen an attorney at Porter & Steel, coordinated the closing; Sharon Fowler of Arbor Realty in Chapel Hill has agreed to serve as pro bono property manager for TLC’s two houses.

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