Joe Lambeth and his dog Rowdy, with Currie’s Store in the background. Lambeth’s maternal grandparents operated the store from 1928 to about 1980. The store reopened briefly as Derby General Store a few years ago.

This is one in an occasional series of profiles of communities in and near Moore County.
Tucked into a corner of Richmond County, fast by the Moore and Montgomery County lines, Derby may seem a lost province, a sojourner in three cultures but a stranger to all.

History dispels this impression.

Derby has played a role in the educational and economic affairs of Richmond County — and of Moore County, too — out of proportion to its population.

That population now numbers 200, more or less, depending on where one draws the boundary lines. Linda McQueen Ravary, whose family has lived in Derby for at least five generations, defined the unincorporated community as extending “two miles in every direction from Currie’s Store.” The store, which operated from 1928 until about 1980, stands empty at the corner of Derby and Jones Springs Church roads.

The community has some of the largest farms in Richmond County. It also has enterprising craftspeople who sell their wares through the Women’s Exchange in Pinehurst.

Derby residents buy their essentials in Ellerbe, 10 miles away. For a wider array of goods and services, they drive to Aberdeen, Southern Pines and Pinehurst. But they are self-sufficient, growing and making much of what they need.

Derby has three churches, a volunteer fire department and a community center. Its residents — a mix of farmers, retirees and young families whose members commute to work — are close-knit.

It wasn’t always that way.

Named for a Yankee

Roger Derby came down from New York in 1911 and shook up the staid rural community. He built a big house, started a huge farm, established his own school and took the lead in forming regional farm and trade associations.

When his farm went belly-up and he returned to the North, some residents felt his loss keenly. But others, more comfortable with the old ways, rejoiced.

Before Roger Derby gave his name to the community, it went by a number of other names. By any name, it has been a community of farms.

The sandy land is suited to raising cotton, fruits and vegetables. There were cotton plantations there at least by the early 1700s.

Linda Ravary said the McQueen farm — which earned recognition as a “Century Family Farm” at the State Fair over a decade ago — has been in her family since well before the Civil War. Several other farms in Derby have been owned by the same families for generations. Tobacco, strawberries, hay and chickens have supplanted cotton as revenue producers.

At one time, the money crop was peaches. The prospect of making a fortune in peaches drew settlers from the North early in the 20th century.

Well-Connected Man

Roger Alden Derby, born the third of four children of a New York surgeon in 1883, was one such. Derby was the scion of a Massachusetts bay seafaring family, descended from Mayflower passengers John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, who were immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

Derby’s father was a roommate at Harvard of President Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln and sometimes visited in the White House. Derby himself went on fishing trips as a child with President Grover Cleveland.

During visits to a cousin in Hyde Park, N.Y., Derby played with the cousin’s neighbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR, a year older than Derby, preceded him by a year through prep school at Groton and college at Harvard, and afterward joined him as an investor in an ill-fated diving expedition for treasure in the Caribbean. But Derby was a Republican, and his favorite Roosevelt was Theodore — whose daughter Ethel married Derby’s brother Dick.

After college, Roger Derby could not settle on a career. He worked as a newspaper reporter, spent two years in charge of the student employment office at Harvard and tried free-lance writing for two years without success (although he continued to write throughout his life — verse, plays and memoirs).

He visited relatives in England, where he admired the lifestyle of gentleman farmers who rode to hounds and threw fancy-dress balls in their palatial homes. He resolved to buy land in the South and become a farmer.

His search for land brought him to the North Carolina Sandhills, where two Harvard acquaintances, Ralph Page (of the Aberdeen Pages) and Raphael Pumpelly II, were raising peaches on a grand scale. Derby bought two parcels of land, totaling 2,780 acres, in Richmond and Moore counties.

With the help of his new neighbors, he built a modest log home, cleared 800 acres of land and planted it in cotton, tobacco and corn. He hired a former slave, Mary Bostic, to cook for him. With lumber from his own trees, he built rough outbuildings and tenant houses. He called his farm Drowning Creek Plantation.

Forming Associations

Derby quickly formed friendships with some Sandhills movers and shakers — Leonard Tufts, Henry Page and others. In 1912, Derby and other farmers formed the Sand Hill Farmers’ Association.

Later that year, Derby helped to organize the Sand Hill Board of Trade as an adjunct to the Farmers’ Association, inviting businessmen from the Aberdeen/Southern Pines area, Ellerbe, Hoffman and Candor to join.

Derby was elected president, and he described the goal of the new organization as “develop(ing) the productiveness of the land and its natural resources” in order to finance “more schoolhouses, more rural society and rural conventions, better roads [and] more of the conveniences that come from the association of people.” Within two years, the Board of Trade had a central office in Aberdeen and a full-time secretary and field manager, Clyde Davis.

The outbreak of war in Europe caused a disastrous drop in cotton prices. Derby negotiated a $100,000 loan from a Boston bank to build warehouses where Sandhills cotton could be stored until the price stabilized.

In 1915, convinced that America’s entry into the war was inevitable, Derby enrolled, along with Ralph and Frank Page, in an officers’ training program in upstate New York. Back home, Derby formed a motorized machine-gun company of local men. He mounted a gun on a fender of a farm truck and set up a practice target in a pasture. He equipped the boys at Sandhills Farm Life School with uniforms and old-style rifles and put them through daily drills. He organized a rifle club of boys 12 and up.

But when Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, offered to send him overseas as an officer on a destroyer, Derby pleaded that he had to stay at home to work the farm — which he had just converted from cotton production to peaches. Later he volunteered for active duty in the Army as a private, but the war ended before he was called up.

Educational Endeavors

Derby was distressed at the state of public education in North Carolina. He offered to build a school for grades 1-8, to consolidate the four one-room schools in the Derby area, on seven acres of his own property and to donate the school and land to Richmond County. He would pay the school’s operating costs for three years. The county school board agreed, and Derby Memorial School opened in the fall of 1915.

The school offered vocational training as well as academic subjects. The students quickly learned the basics of farming and home economics, taking all the prizes at the 1915 Richmond County Fair. Derby bought the school a printing press, and the students began to publish The Drowning Creek Current, which carried news of the school and community.

The school added classrooms and two more grades. It had 300 students by 1918.

The Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Sand Hill Board of Trade established an annual county agricultural fair at Pinehurst and the original Farm Life School in Moore County. At Farm Life, students could earn their way while getting a high school education and picking up the rudiments of farming. When McConnell Hospital was built on the school property, nursing was added to the curriculum for female students. The school was a model for rural schools.

Women of the Sandhills also opened the Women’s Exchange in Pinehurst in 1922. A charter member of the Women’s Exchange board was Molly Lovering of Derby, an accomplished cook, gardener and craftswoman who taught other Sandhills women the skills to produce goods for the Women’s Exchange.

“Molly taught me to make bird feeders with suet, birdseed, pine cones and stovepipe wire,” said Joy McCall, who still lives in Derby. “I’d put them in plastic bags, tie the bags up with big red bows and ship them everywhere for sale.”

Rows of Sycamores

Lovering and her husband, Richard, had come from Boston to Derby to farm. They built a house on a road that became known as Sycamore Lane after Richard Lovering planted rows of sycamore trees on both sides. The sycamores still stand, now being replaced as they die by the N.C. Department of Transportation.

Roger Derby built two more houses. He brought his bride, Elizabeth, to his second house, a wood-frame structure, in 1917. Soon the Derbys had started a family, and Derby built his third house: a rambling split-level edifice of brick and stucco, containing 20 rooms including quarters for a cook, a maid and a governess for the children. The second Derby home became a teacherage for the faculty at Derby Memorial School.

Several years of peach-damaging frosts destroyed Derby’s dream of farming the Sandhills. He returned to New York in 1926. He died in 1949. His widow maintained a home in Pinehurst and spent summers there regularly until her death, making her last known visit to the old homeplace in Derby at age 97 in 1977.

Derby Memorial School closed in 1928, after its enrollment declined until the state would no longer fund teachers’ salaries.

The Curries

Herbert Currie and his wife, Mildred McIntyre Currie, bought a sizable portion of Roger Derby’s farm, and for many years they made a go of peach farming where Derby had failed.

They did it by dint of backbreaking labor.

“Once,” Mildred Currie recalled in 1978, “we worked all night, loading 18 truckloads of peaches from our pack house.”

The Curries established Currie’s Store, a grocery and general merchandise store, in 1928 and ran it together until Herbert Currie fell ill in 1976; he died later that year. Mildred Currie continued to operate the store for several years with the help of W.D. “Dee” Wilson, who had begun work with the Curries as a farmhand 30 years before and had managed their other store, Ellerbe Farm Supply, for a number of years. Mildred Currie died in 1982.

For much of the time that Currie’s Store was in business, the Curries operated a tractor dealership in a building next door. Mildred Currie would go from one building to the other to wait on customers.

Somehow, Herbert Currie found time to work the farm, and Mildred Currie found time to win prizes with her flowers and canned goods and sewing. The couple raised four children.

Community Center

About 1970, Herbert Currie donated an acre of land to the Derby community for a community center. Men of the community built the center.

Until the mid-1980s, it was the site of weekend square dances at which local musicians played. Then, said Joy McCall, a Charlotte native who has lived in Derby for more than 50 years, “a rough crowd” began to disrupt the dances. The weekend dances ceased.

The center is still the site of quarterly community meetings and is rented out for wedding receptions, birthday parties and family reunions.

A daughter of the Curries, Frances, married Mike Lambeth, who took over responsibility for the Curries’ farm and christened it “Triple L Farm” for himself and the Lambeths’ twin sons, Joe and Jim. The sons took over the farm after their father’s death. Jim Lambeth is a member of the Richmond County Planning Board.

Frances Lambeth still lives in the Derby house.

A daughter of Mike and Frances Lambeth, Joyce Lambeth, carries the mail to Derby from the Ellerbe Post Office.

Derby Today

Cecil “Mac” McCall was a third-generation Derby farmer who, with his wife, Joy, established Busy Bee Farm, named for the couples’ thriving honey-producing business. For many years, Joy McCall sold beeswax candles and other crafts at the Women’s Exchange. Mac McCall went off to war and returned in 1945, a much-decorated veteran of the European Theatre.

Mac McCall died last year, but Joy still lives in the couple’s home, her tobacco acreage now farmed by Jim Lambeth and the bees newly hived on the Etha Bennett farm.

Joy McCall knows everybody in Derby. She took time away from a quilting project to speak of some of her neighbors:

“Mac’s brother Cliff’s widow, Mildred ‘Chick’ McCall, moved here from Raleigh in 1954. She’s 87 but still teaches Sunday school at Jones Springs Methodist Church. She’s a great counselor and mentor.

“William Robinson and his wife are new to Derby. They were displaced by the work on Interstate 73/74. They wanted a quiet neighborhood, so they built a new house here.

“Jane Hogan lives on Sycamore Lane. She’s a great cook and does catering for North Carolina Speedway.

“Berniece Hunsucker teaches at Hoffman School and is a Girl Scout leader.

“Sara and Sam Robbins are very active in the community. Sara manages the Rankin Museum of American Heritage in Ellerbe.

“Nat Rankin is a young tobacco farmer.

“Junior and Betty Wilson and their son Brian operate Gold Leaf Farms. Junior is a county commissioner.

“Ed and David DeWitt are both tobacco and poultry farmers.

“Jane Hogan’s son, Allen, and his wife, Rhonda, are poultry farmers, and he also has a business in Cordova.

“Charlie and Joanne Rabb live on Pappy Rabb Road, which is named for his father. Charlie made the sign for our community building. Joanne volunteers at Moore Regional Hospital. ‘Pappy’ Rabb was a skilled woodcarver, and some of his work is on display in the Rankin Museum.”

‘Garden Spot’

McCall said Derby’s chief non-farm business is the Travel Resorts of America campground and its adjunct, Sycamore Lodge. The campground is usually crammed full of campers and motor homes — often including vehicles belonging to Derby area families who camp there to participate in dances and cookouts.

Visitors to the campground are not tourists, she said, but people looking for a respite from their busy routines.

“They usually stay for a week or two,” she said. “They go to services in the local churches, and they take part in community activities. They helped pick up litter along the highways as part of Spring Cleanup Week.”

McCall said she agrees with her late husband’s assessment of Derby.

“Mac always called Derby the garden spot of the world,” she said.

Information for this article came from Chris Florance’s book “Up from Mt. Misery” (Down Home Press, 1990), interviews in 1978 with Mildred Currie and Dee Wilson, a 1994 interview with Cecil McCall, and recent interviews with Joy McCall and Linda Ravary. Also contributing helpful material were Earl and Lydia Key, Pete Vuncannon and Helen Cox.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]