Peninsula In Passage

John and Rhonda Holland Folks in Driver and Bennett’s Creek knew John C. Holland as an unpretentious man who did things his way. He was also a man of vision who, ahead of his time, understood and lived the concepts of re-use and recycling. Holland, President of John C. Holland Enterprises and Hampton Roads Disposal, located near Driver, frequently made news with his skirmishes with government authorities but never doubted the validity of the landfill as the future of waste disposal. He died unexpectedly in December 2011, at the age of 56. His neighbors and friends in Driver remember him riding his Tennessee Walker down to the crossroads where the horse, trained to ring a bell, signaled for a beer for Holland who would then ride on to the ball field, drink in hand. Or they might

remember the man who would stop to pick up an old, discarded chair on the side of the road because he knew someone who could use that chair. Or the man who bought an outdated fire engine from the Driver Volunteer Fire Department and parked the vintage engine in his yard. John and Rhonda Holland were married in 1977 and Holland opened his landfill in 1979.

“Driver was a totally different world then,” Rhonda Holland says. “There was no traffic on Nansemond Parkway and we’d have to drive into Portsmouth for groceries. Everyone that lived in Driver was real and over at Boney’s store Leah Whedbee would post bad checks on the wall.” Many remember Holland as the man who gambled on buying a rundown, 4800-acre estate, Oak Ridge, in rural Nelson County, Virginia, and brought the mansion and grounds back to life, often with materials garnered from the landfill operation. In 2001 he opened a racetrack at the 200-year-old estate and operated live harness racing. The renewal of Oak Ridge ranks as a massive lesson in reuse and recycling but the family’s move there in 1990 came with a wrench. “I was in shock – Driver was home,” Rhonda Holland says. “We moved from isolation to real isolation.”

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