Excavation and land clearing across Johnston County, NC.

Smithfield and the smaller town of Selma a few miles north form the working commercial center of Johnston County, and the corridor between them along I-95 is where most of the new commercial and residential growth has been concentrated. The eastern half of the county, toward Princeton and Pine Level, is more traditionally rural — row crops, timber, the kind of small-town agricultural pattern that has not changed much in decades. The western half, where Clayton sits closest to the Wake County line, has been absorbing Raleigh metro spillover for two decades and is now functionally suburban. The terrain across the whole county is upper coastal plain — gently rolling, sandy loam soils, with the Neuse River cutting through Smithfield and the Little River forming the southern boundary with Sampson.

Bentonville Battlefield is in the eastern part of Johnston County, near the small community of Four Oaks. It is the site of the largest Civil War battle fought on North Carolina soil — a three-day engagement in March 1865 that was the last major Confederate effort to stop General Sherman’s march north from Savannah. The battlefield is now a North Carolina state historic site with preserved earthworks, the Harper House (which served as a Union field hospital), and an interpretive center. Unlike Lenoir County’s CSS Neuse Confederate ironclad heritage — which is centered on a recovered vessel and a downtown Kinston museum — Johnston’s Civil War heritage is a working battlefield landscape with active preservation easements on adjacent farmland. We do not handle preservation work directly but we know to flag the proximity if a project is anywhere near the historic site boundary.

The Neuse River runs through Smithfield and the central part of Johnston County, on its way downstream toward Wayne and eventually New Bern. It is the same Neuse that anchors Wayne, Lenoir, and Craven county geography further east — Johnston is the upstream end of the river’s passage through the eastern coastal plain, before it picks up the major tributaries that broaden it. Property along the Neuse or its tributaries (Little River, Mill Creek) carries flood-history considerations, especially since Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018 both caused meaningful flooding in the Smithfield area. The rest of the county is upland sandy loam that drains reasonably well most of the year.

The kind of work we get called for in Johnston County reflects the county’s split character. The eastern and southern parts of the county still produce the kind of rural-residential and agricultural work that we do throughout eastern NC — farm property, lot prep, drainage rebuilds, driveway work on country roads. But the western half, especially around Clayton and the I-95 corridor in Smithfield/Selma, is increasingly residential infill and small commercial work tied to Raleigh-spillover growth. We are about two and a half hours north of our Whiteville yard via I-95, which puts Johnston on the longer end of our regular routes, and we usually only enter the county when there is enough work on a single trip to justify the drive. Most Johnston jobs pair with Wayne County trips because the two counties are adjacent and share the Neuse drainage.