WINTER 2017 NEWSLETTER
Photo of Haywood Rankin by Todd Hess
THE STORY OF
REDLAIR
Haywood Rankin’s Gaston County homeplace has a past – and, thanks to him, a bright future By Page Leggett
aywood Rankin’s life is inextricably linked to the Gaston County land he grew up on. Since his childhood, the land has been a source of joy, pride and pain. But no matter what the land has given him, Haywood has loved it like it’s a member of the family. Haywood’s mother, Jean, christened the property “Redlair” because the color of the land then was red – “with gullies everywhere,” Haywood recalls – and because of the striking color of the hair of her five children and their father, Forney “Red” Rankin. But the family matriarch never wanted to live here. “She felt out of her urban and literary element,” Haywood said. Haywood was 7 when the family moved to the 100 acres that would become Redlair. Even that young, he was responsible for feeding cattle. “I was enraptured from the time we moved here,” he said. For all he has done for this property and for conservation in the region, the North Carolina Land Trust Council awarded Haywood its Lifetime Achievement Award earlier this year. Tom Okel, Alesia DiCosola, Andy Kane, Sharon Wilson and Matt Covington from Catawba Lands Conservancy were in Hendersonville for the ceremony. “Haywood has dedicated his life to and has been the driving force in the protection and ongoing management of Redlair,” said Tom Okel, executive director. “This land is one of the largest and most ecologically significant conservation preserves in this part of the state.”
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A rare piece of property If you’re invited to Redlair, you’ll probably be asked to take a walk. “One cannot appreciate Redlair without walking,” Haywood wrote in an email when we were scheduling my visit. “To get a full concept of Redlair, you would need to walk all 120 miles of trails, so designed as always to focus on a different miracle.” What makes Redlair so special? The river, for one thing. The main stem of the Catawba River was converted decades ago into a series of reservoirs, but the South Fork remains intact as far south as Redlair and McAdenville before it empties into Lake Wylie. But water can give, and it can take away. The soil eventually became ill-suited for Red’s purpose: farming. Too much erosion meant no more row crops. The land held treasures, though. It was home to significant populations of threatened species and unusually large tracts of mature oak and hickory. The Bigleaf Magnolia and Schweinitz’s Sunflower thrive here. Haywood’s parents’ marriage did not. Even before Red and Jean divorced in 1974 and divided the land, the debt-burdened Red figured out a way to finance his passion for purchasing property. “Dad created some of the first housing developments in the area, including along Rankin Road,” Haywood said. “He never
had much capital, so he raised money to buy interior land by selling lots at the paved roads.” There’s a grand irony surrounding the now-preserved Redlair. Haywood said, “It would not have existed if [Dad] had not been a minor developer – sad but true.” “My father was willing to live with phenomenal debt to become the landed gentry he aspired to be,” he said. “He wanted a farm,” Haywood said. “But he wasn’t a farmer.”
A gift to posterity Selling their land could’ve netted the Rankin family plenty of cash. “If you have land worth protecting, usually people want money for it,” Haywood told me in the dining room of the home he shares with his wife, Sabine; two cats; two dogs and three horses. Haywood and two of his siblings, Charles and Katherine, sold the property in 2014 to the state – specifically, to North Carolina’s Plant Conservation Program, which is dedicated to conserving threatened plant species and their natural habitats. They also committed every dollar of the proceeds to a foundation dedicated to protecting Redlair. In other words, the Rankins got nothing from the sale of their family land. The family’s conservation efforts started much earlier – beginning in 1983 with Haywood’s mother. Red got involved in the effort in 1990. Ultimately, the Rankin family put most of Redlair into easements held by the American Farmland Trust. When the Catawba Lands Conservancy was formed in the early 1990s, the American Farmland Trust transferred the original Redlair easements to the Conservancy. At that time, CLC had about 25 acres of protected property. The Rankin gift added 640 acres and gave CLC the clout it needed.
You can go home again Home has a way of luring us back. Haywood, a former Morehead Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill (class of 1968 and law school class of 1971), returned in 1998 as a 52-year-old retired diplomat. He had served the U.S. State Department in hot spots such as Syria before coming home to the land he loves best. While he was still in the diplomatic corps – back in 1990 – Haywood persuaded his dad to protect all of the portion of Redlair he owned. Red overcame his aversion to outside control and realized that his greatest legacy would be a permanently protected Redlair. Haywood has dedicated his life to preserving tracts of land that today
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