Ina Jean Stephens walked the floor of the gleaming new Caterpillar plant built on farmland that had been in her family for generations.
Nobody would have ever dreamed that there'd be a factory on the land, she told me.
"I'm a farmer," she said. "It's hard to lose land and have buildings on it. But it had to be done. It seems to be a good thing. Maybe it will provide a lot of jobs."
The occasion was the grand opening of the plant off Temple School Road in Winston-Salem. The plant will provide jobs for more than 500 full-time and contract workers. It's an important part of our transforming economy. At the groundbreaking last November for the plant, the Journal's Richard Craver reported, Mayor Allen Joines said that the ceremony represented a bridge between the land's farming past and its manufacturing future.
"Many times this land was broken for the planting of seeds into the ground," he said. "Today, we're putting seeds into the ground, seeds that will mature into jobs and prosperity for our community."
And as our economy transforms, we'd do well to remember our history and balance development with land preservation.
That's what I was thinking as I walked through the factory with Stephens. Company officials divided their visitors into several small groups to tour the plant, and I'd had the good luck to land in a group with Stephens and other members of the family that once owned the Caterpillar land.
They grew corn, soybeans, tobacco and wheat, Stephens told me. They raised milk cows and beef cattle, too. "We did OK. We weren't millionaires or anything," she said.
By the time she was growing up in the 1930s, seven generations of her family had lived and died on the farmland where the new plant is now. They included Quakers, Primitive Baptists and Moravians. The main family names were Smith and Sells. Through marriages, Tuckers and Stephens were added to the mix. They were hard workers, not given much to complaining. Ina Jean Stephens doesn't remember the Great Depression as being that bad.
"We had food to eat," she said. "We ate off the land, mostly."
For years, her family was all but isolated on their rural farmland. But in recent years, subdivisions have sprung up all around them. Stephens said her late brother, Robert Tucker, used to say he'd rather have a factory beside his land than to be surrounded by houses.
The reality these days is both are on land that was once rural. We need both kinds of development, as long as they're organized.
But along the way, we need to preserve farms and forests, lest we become some concrete-to-concrete wasteland. For example, riding around the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, which takes in Norfolk and several other cities, you can't tell where one city ends and another begins. It's all developed.
In the Triad, at least for now, there's plenty of green space between our cities.
Let's hope it stays that way. And there are encouraging signs.
For one, Stephens and a few of her relatives held onto some of their land and live around the plant. Some of the land is still being farmed.
May that always be the case.
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