Excavation and land clearing across Robeson County, NC.

Almost all of Robeson County drains into the Lumber River and its tributaries. The Lumber itself is a blackwater river that has carved a wide floodplain through the southern half of the county, and a lot of property here either touches the river or sits on land that the river has worked at some point in the last fifty years. The four towns we get called into most regularly are Lumberton on the river itself, Pembroke twenty minutes west, and Red Springs and Fairmont in the southern half of the county. The soil profile here has more clay than you find in counties closer to the actual coast, which makes for different base-prep conditions on driveway and pad work.

Robeson took two of the worst flood events in recent NC history — Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018. Both hit Lumberton particularly hard, and the city still has neighborhoods where the flood line on the buildings is visible from the street. Anyone working excavation in this county for any length of time has done post-flood site work: hauling debris off lots, regrading land that the water rearranged, replacing culverts that were undersized for the storms that have happened and oversized for what was supposed to happen. We are not flood-restoration specialists but we know what storm-touched ground needs before anything new gets put on it.

Pembroke is also home to the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, which is the historically Lumbee-serving institution of the UNC system. The campus and the surrounding town have grown steadily over the last decade and that growth pulls site work, parking lot construction, and pad-building demand along with it. Pembroke is about twenty minutes from Lumberton, and we will often pair a Pembroke job with a Lumberton job in the same trip — same equipment trailer, same crew, just two stops on the route.

Lumberton is the closest thing to a real population center in any of the counties west of Whiteville we work in regularly. That changes the kind of work we get called for here compared to smaller-town counties. Robeson County jobs are more often commercial pad construction, parking lot grading, larger-acreage clearing for new subdivisions, and the kind of multi-day projects that need bigger equipment and more crew on site. We bring what the job needs — the same fleet that runs the smaller residential lots in Columbus also handles the larger commercial work in Robeson — and we price the equipment time honestly based on what each site actually requires.