Marble – The entrance to Mainspring Conservation Trust land on Welch Farm is hidden away like a secret.
A singular brown sign with a picture of a canoe heralds the driveway. One miscalculate blink and it’s missed. The drive back into the farm requires steady nerves to zig-zag around potholes, but river access is open to the public. In fact, 57 of the just over 100 acres are available for public use, though few people know about it.
Sara Posey Davis, a Cherokee County native, wants to turn that secret into an announcement. She’s a six-year veteran as senior land conservation manager for Mainspring Conservation Trust.
“That just means I am in charge of the all the land and easement acquisitions,” she said, trying to unpack her title.
Mainspring, which was established in Franklin in 1997, made it their focus to create a regional nonprofit land trust, with the sole mission of conserving the waters, forests, farms and culture of southern Blue Ridge Mountains.
About 650 acres of the drive between Andrews and Murphy, and arguably the pretties part, is managed under Mainspring’s trust. This includes 7 miles of river frontage. Posey Davis said their situation is unique.
“There are literally just three historic landowners, so it’s just three big family farms,” she said.
The Solomons, who renamed their land Welch Farm & Preserve as a nod to the area’s Cherokee history, were the first to conserve their farmland. Once they were protected under the trust, the Solomons donated the land, which provides the riverfront access to the public, back to Mainspring.
The Townsons were next to join the trust, joined by the Wood brothers in December 2021. It took five years to negotiate and finalize the 250-acre Wood Farm, which was founded in the early 1900s.
“The Wood brothers are really well-known farmers, well-respected farmers,” Posey Davis said. “Ed and Keith, they are private folks, and obviously this was a huge decision. It took us five years to get this done.”
Each acquisition is unique and may require a specific grant to match the needs of the landowners. The grant Mainspring found to fund Wood Farm was eventually redirected to the Solomon farm.
Posey Davis finally wrote a grant proposal to a state-funded trust called the N.C. Agricultural Development & Farmland Preservation. It was this grant the suited the Wood brothers’ needs.
“The trust fund pays landowners to give up their right to development,” Posey Davis said. “It’s totally geared toward farming.”
The process was complicated and protracted.
“I’ll have had two babies by the time this [Wood] project is done,” Posey Davis said with a laugh.
“We joked that with the funding source, I was going to go into early labor with all the legal complexities.”
However, with patience on both sides of the deal, it was completed pending one easement issue.
“It’s forever. For evermore it will be used for agricultural. It doesn’t necessarily have to be row crops. It can be cattle; it can be goats, whatever. It just has to follow USDA best management practices for farming,” Posey Davis said.
Mainspring does not use eminent domain, as they are not taking land. They don’t even own any land except through donations from landowners. Their job is to secure the future of the highly prized land as agricultural.
“This soil ranks prime,” Posey Davis said with pride. “It’s the best soil for growing crops in the entire nation.”
Mainspring “is here to provide a service to landowners. It’s all voluntary,” she said. “As long as their vision for the property matches Mainspring’s mission, we can jive. I mean, we’re not a government entity taking land.”
In fact, it’s just the opposite; Mainspring works to preserve the land from commercial acquisition and development.
“Farming is a dying business. All of their assets are in the dirt, so to speak,” Posey Davis said. “This program brings some of that equity out of the dirt and into their pockets.”
She feels Keith Wood summed up their mission with clarity. “He told her, ‘You can’t eat asphalt.’ ”