Excavation and land clearing across Hoke County, NC.

The Fort Bragg border has reshaped Hoke County over the past thirty years. Between 1990 and 2000 the county’s population grew by 47 percent. The next decade added more than ten thousand residents, and growth has not stopped since. Most of that growth is housing for military families and contractors — new subdivisions, new driveways, new commercial pad work for the retail and service businesses that fill in behind the residential build-out. That kind of work is steady, but it is not most of what Ward does on a typical week, and the drive from Whiteville to Raeford is longer than the majority of our weekly route — meaning we take the Hoke jobs where the scope or the customer relationship makes the trip earn its keep.

Hoke sits in the NC Sandhills region, and the soil profile here is different from the coastal plain counties closer to home. The topsoil is sandy — fast-draining, low cohesion — and the subsoil can have scattered clay or hardpan lenses depending on exactly where on a property you dig. Those conditions favor certain kinds of work (clearing sandy pine stands is cleaner than working wet hardwood bottoms; access in wet weather is better than it is back east) and make other kinds harder (ponds can be difficult unless the natural clay layer is thick enough to hold water; pads and driveways need proper base stone because the native sand will not hold compaction by itself). Any crew that does site work in Hoke has to know how Sandhills ground behaves and plan base prep accordingly.

Before the Fort Bragg expansion reshaped the county, Hoke’s economy was rooted in lumber, turpentine, cotton, and livestock. That agricultural base still has a footprint — Butterball runs a major poultry processing operation here, and scattered farm and timber tracts remain common once you get away from the Raeford growth corridor. Burlington Industries and Unilever also operate in the county. The combination of agricultural properties and military-market residential growth creates a varied excavation mix: farm drainage and pond work on one end, driveway construction and small commercial grading on the other. We see both, but the drive time shapes which ones we take on.

Hoke is at the edge of our weekly operating radius. We go up there for the right job — larger clearing work, meaningful grading scopes, the occasional pond on a property where the owner prefers a crew they have used before to one they have not. Small paving jobs rarely justify the drive on their own; we will quote paving on a Hoke project when it is paired with a larger scope or when the site work is substantial enough that the combined job earns the trip. Most weeks our route passes through Cumberland County to the east, and Hoke jobs pair cleanly with that routing when the timing lines up. If you are in Raeford or the surrounding area and calling about a project, we will be straight with you about whether the trip fits — and if it does not, we will tell you that too instead of padding a quote to cover unfamiliar ground.