A lot has happened in the unincorporated community of Midway, in Moore County, North Carolina. Midway is just across the railroad tracks from the Town of Aberdeen – another popular golf community.
Maurice Holland has seen a lot of this change and he’s been partly responsible for it. The 63-year-old licensed practical nurse lives across the street from the home where he grew up. Like many of the mostly African American residents there, he left for several years to work, and found his way back.
Like Jackson Hamlet and some other mostly black communities in Moore County – Midway sits in an ETJ, Extraterritorial Jurisdiction. It’s a special designation approved by the state of North Carolina that gives municipalities a tool to control growth and promote better planning. The problem with this designation, folks tell me, is that communities can be held and ignored in an ETJ forever. Holland says that’s what was happening to Midway. But today, water and sewer lines are literally being placed in the ground, and Holland says Aberdeen is finally considering annexing them.
For almost nine years, Holland has sat on the Aberdeen Planning Board as its ETJ representative. He tells me, a Midway presence has made a world of difference for the community:
“You get information on the inside. You see the trends. Youare there to approve or amend or vary plans or subdivisions, andyou understand what’s happening. So when you come back to your community you can explain the consequences of doing nothing.”
Holland admits the residents living in the nearly 30 homes making up Midway did nothing for a long time. And then, he says, with the help of community activists and the Center for Civil Rights at the UNC Law School, they demonstrated near the 2005 US Open Golf Tournament in Pinehurst – also in southern Moore County. It brought attention to their struggles, he says.
Besides the water and sewer lines, a community of homes will soon be built in Midway – something Holland says he thought he’d never see. When about 10 acres went up for auction by the State Department of Transportation, Holland, the Center for Civil Rights and others started looking for a buyer. Turns out, Habitat for Humanity stepped up. Good news for Holland and the other residents. He says wealthy subdivisions were springing up around them and it was only a matter of time before they could have been priced out.
Invisible Fences of Moore County 