$40 million campaign launched to save pristine NC game lands from development

Conservationists launched a $40 million campaign Thursday to save 4,000 acres of pristine North Carolina game land from development.

The owner of the land along the Yadkin River between Salisbury and Albemarle allowed public access to hunters, anglers and others for years before recently deciding to sell the property, officials with Salisbury-based Three Rivers Land Trust told The Charlotte Observer.

The Land Trust needs to raise the money to buy and conserve the land located on the Tuckertown Reservoir in Davidson, Rowan, and Stanly counties, Travis Morehead, Land Trust executive director, told the Observer this week.

Selling to developers risks “long-standing public access, wildlife habitat, water quality, and the area’s rural character,” Land Trust officials said in a news release Thursday announcing the campaign.

The owner isn’t sitting around waiting for the Land Trust to raise the money, Morehead told the Observer. “It’s a competition,” he said. “There’s no guarantee he won’t sell it to someone else.”

Raising the money “will be challenging,” Morehead said in the release. “But if we don’t try, who will? We can’t just sit by and watch these lands be decimated by development.”

If it can buy the property, the Land Trust would transfer the lands to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission “to ensure perpetual public access,” officials said.

Because they’ve hunted and fished on the property for so long, many people think the commission is the land owner, commission wildlife biologist Cody Fulk said.

“Unfortunately, they are not,” Fulk said in the release. “If these lands are lost to development, public access to all users could be gone forever.”

‘’One of the last wild areas available to the public”

In 2019 and 2021, Three Rivers Land Trust and the commission conserved at least 4,700 acres and 76 miles of shoreline on High Rock Lake and the Tuckertown Reservoir, officials said.

The eastern shoreline of Tuckertown Reservoir, totaling 2,420 acres and 31 miles of shoreline, was purchased and conserved in 2021.

“After permanently conserving the eastern shoreline, it’s hard to imagine losing the western shoreline to development,” Morehead said. “We have invested too much and have too much at stake not to act.”

If developers buy the land, people will no longer be able to enjoy “one of the last wild areas still available to the public,” local fishing guide Tony Sharum said in the release.

“Public access gives everyone the opportunity to recreate, and everyone deserves that opportunity,” Kristin Bundy, an agriculture teacher at North Davidson High and public land hunter said. “When I die, I hope heaven looks like these game lands.”

Donate to the Tuckertown Reservoir conservation effort at Save Tuckertown.