Truckin' on the Western Branch

C. Edward “Eddie” Russell Jr. Eddie Russell has watched, first-hand, the evolution of Churchland from sleepy rural village to busy suburb. His father, Charlie Russell, was a farmer and also one of the early developers of Churchland and Western Branch. His uncle, his mother’s younger brother born in 1915, was Ira Richardson, who also farmed considerable acreage in the area. My father was very smart, loved farming, and smoked 25 cigars a day. He was always very hands-on and worked all the time. I never saw him. In 1929 he started an oil business in Portsmouth, then became a developer with G. T. McLean and developed Pinehurst, Green Acres, Sterling Point, and Sweetbriar. When my father and McLean bought the Carney farm, Churchland became a bedroom community to Portsmouth. My father always said “rooftops first.”

C. Edward “Eddie” Russell Jr. Images by Sheally

The family had 600 acres in Respass Beach but lost the farms during the Depression. It’s always shocking to see my grandmother’s farm now Buffalo Wild Wings—it had been such a wonderful refuge.

We moved from Wake Forest Road in Pinehurst to Hatton Point Farm in the 1940s, to a farmhouse on 65 acres. Ernie Hardee lived on the next farm, and Elizabeth Wright lived in the old Carney Farm house nearby. The path to load produce onto river barges was next to our house. There were scattered houses in the neighborhood and the Suburban Country Club was where the Cypress Cove condos are now. Pinehurst and Green Acres were just being developed and everyone had horses. I played football every day after school and played baseball on the field behind our home. We ran barefoot, catching lightning bugs at night, and pulled taffy. If you did anything wrong, your mother knew about it before nightfall.

I remember Wise Beach and The Shack—it had been an amusement park earlier. Later my mother left the farm to my sister and me, and I sold some of the property to Temple Sinai.

Russell, a lawyer, graduated from Churchland High in 1960 and remembers the feeling of extended family in the community.

He also followed in his father’s developer boot prints. He leased 85 acres of soybean fields to DeBartolo Development to build Chesapeake Square Mall, which opened in 1987–88 as the only mall in the area. Much of the rest of the Chesapeake Square commercial development is on land owned by the Russell family, including the Lowe’s center developed by another Churchland grad, Robert Stanton.

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