Farm clans often inherit a fight

Rising land value lures many from heritage

In North Carolina's hotbeds of suburban growth, heirs of large tracts of land often face tough choices -- keeping their family inheritance intact or selling to developers.

Sometimes, the decisions can tear families apart.

Steven Ray, 58, knows this well. He no longer speaks much to several siblings after they argued over the division of his father's estate, including farms in Wake and Granville counties. Ray said he had always been more attached to the land than his siblings were.

"I've walked it, stepped it, farmed it. I've rolled every rock over on it," he said. "They didn't have any blood, sweat and tears in it."

Jimmy Narron, a Smithfield estate planning lawyer and Johnston County farmer, said he has dealt with similarly sticky situations in countless farm transfers across Eastern North Carolina.

Problems stem from people not writing wills or, worse yet, parents trying to "marry" their children together in land or business partnerships, Narron said. People cling to the notion that all their children will get along. They won't, he said, and even if they do, there's a good chance their spouses won't.

"It did not work for Cain and Abel," Narron said he tells clients almost daily. "It didn't work in Shakespeare or the Bible, and it ain't going to work for you."

The other problem with land transfers is this: Equal does not always mean fair.

Most people want to deal with their children equally. But same-sized tracts can hold wildly different values depending on such factors as how flood-prone, rocky or close to the road each piece is, said Tom Steele, real property chair of the N.C. Bar Association.

In North Carolina, land is increasingly getting busted up.

"We're an older state," said Guido van der Hoeven, an N.C. State University agricultural economics specialist, who has seen farmers' deeds dating back to King George. "We've had land handed down more times. We've got smaller tracts of land."

But the biggest trend making estate planning more necessary, especially in the Triangle, is the enormous upward pressure on land values. Many land-rich, cash-poor farmers may have spent their whole life scratching out a modest living, van der Hoeven said. When they find out they're suddenly millionaires -- at least on paper -- it's a lot to wrap their heads around, he said.

Hefty estate taxes incurred after a person dies, along with zooming property taxes, can push heirs to sell the land.

Raised on the land

Ray has never wanted to let go of any part of his family's land.

To him, the land represents everything his parents worked for. His grandfather died when his father was 14, leaving the family destitute. Years later, when Ray's great grandfather's estate went up for auction on the courthouse steps in Raleigh, Ray's father borrowed money from three different sources to buy the 140 acres.

Today, Ray still lives on a 22-acre portion of the family's original homestead, around the intersection of Old Creedmoor and Creedmoor roads in Wake County, just south of Falls Lake. Ray maintains a horse farm on it and tends a vegetable garden, with squash, okra, corn and beans.

He's also trying to save the home his great-grandfather built there in 1875. Ray grew up in the home; his father lived in it until his death. It is dilapidated, but people still stop by at times to draw pictures of it, Ray said.

The baby in the family, Ray also helped his parents on the farm longest of any of the five children.

"They almost had to chase me away," Ray joked.

Ray worked side by side with his father, plowing fields of cotton, tobacco and corn -- first with mules and, later, with tractors. Ray also milked cows, raised pigs and fed chickens. He farmed with them full time until he was 24 and continued part time while working as a welder until his father retired from farming in 1982.