Excavation and land clearing across Wayne County, NC.

Goldsboro sits on the south bank of the Neuse River, which crosses Wayne County from west to east on its way toward Kinston and eventually New Bern. Most of the populated land in the county clusters along the river or along US-70, the major east-west highway that parallels it. The town of Mount Olive sits in the southern part of the county, well away from both the river and Goldsboro, in the middle of the agricultural belt that has defined the county economy for generations. The terrain across the whole county is upper coastal plain — gently rolling, with sandy loam topsoil over clay subsoil and a working landscape that is mostly cropland, timber, and rural residential.

Seymour Johnson Air Force Base is the home of the 4th Fighter Wing and sits directly inside the city of Goldsboro — not on a sprawling federal reservation outside town the way Fort Liberty does in Cumberland County, and not on a coastal land footprint the way Camp Lejeune does in Onslow. Seymour Johnson is a compact urban airbase that fits inside the city limits, which means the surrounding civilian areas are not a separate base-driven housing corridor the way Sneads Ferry is — they are just Goldsboro. That changes the kind of work that comes up in this county. Wayne County is more about residential and small commercial work in a normal city economy than it is about contractor work in a base ecosystem.

The Mount Olive Pickle Company has its headquarters in the town of Mount Olive in the southern part of the county. It has been there since 1926 and it is the largest independent pickle company in the United States. Around the headquarters, the agricultural infrastructure that supports a major food processor — cucumber farms, refrigerated trucking, the supply chain that runs into the plant — has shaped the economic geography of the southern half of the county for nearly a century. We see steady work on agricultural property in this part of Wayne, including farm pond construction, drainage rebuilds for old field systems, and access road maintenance for working farms.

I-795 runs north from I-95 through the middle of Wayne County, connecting Goldsboro and Mount Olive to the interstate freight network. That corridor — which only opened in 2007 — has reshaped the commercial development pattern in the county over the last fifteen years, pulling new construction and warehousing toward the I-795 exits and away from the older US-70 corridor. The kind of excavation work we get called for in Wayne reflects both economies in the county: residential and city-edge commercial work near Goldsboro, and agricultural and rural-residential work in the Mount Olive part of the county. The drive from our Whiteville yard up to Goldsboro is about an hour and ten minutes on US-117, which makes Wayne a regular pairing with our Sampson County and Lenoir County routes.