'Potent and evocative' at the start, how alluring is Wilmington's Echo Farms community 50 years on?

Back in 1972, a story appeared in the StarNews announcing the development of a new golf course, country club and residential community just south of what was then Wilmington's city limits. The development was called Echo Farms, and the price of new homes started at $40,000, and just $28,000 for a condominium.

Echo Farms has seen lots of changes in the 50 years since ground was broken on its development, and not just the more than tenfold rise in home prices. The golf course is no more, but the community still exists and is bigger than ever, now encompassing about a dozen different homeowner associations for neighborhoods with names like Arbor Trace, Hawthorne at the Pointe, Muirfield Townes and Wimbledon Court.

Up until 1971, the area now known as Echo Farms was an actual dairy farm, and had been since 1908. The last surviving dairy farm in New Hanover County when it shut down, was owned by A.O. McEachern, whose last name should be familiar to longtime Wilmingtonians. McEachern's relative, W.H. McEachern, and his descendants owned and operated W.H. McEachern's Sons wholesale grocers locally for decades.

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The Echo Farms lore is both potent and evocative. Reportedly, McEachern named it Echo Farms because of the sounds emanating from the adjacent woodlands, which was heavily forested in those days. Former StarNews outdoors correspondent Mike Marsh once wrote a column about the tradition of goose hunting in the area around the farm, much of which was rather swampy.

The dairy farm was a serious operation, with more than 200 cows on some 1,000 acres producing, at its height, 300,000 gallons of milk per year. From 1944 to 1946, German prisoners of war held in the Wilmington area provided labor at the farm.

By the late 1960s, however, an ever-growing Wilmington had begun to encroach on the farm, and in 1972, McEachern's son-in-law, J.D. McCarley Jr., sold the the property to another Wilmingtonian with a well-known name: Hugh MacRae II, whose Oleander Company owned the Echo Farms Development Co.

An avid golfer had a vision to rival Pinehurst

MacRae was an avid golfer, and the initial plan was for a championship-style course at Echo Farms to rival some of the finest courses in the state, from those in Pinehurst to the North Ridge Country Club in Raleigh.

Echo Farms Golf and Country Club opened in 1974, with tennis courts and a private pool in addition to golf, and the area was annexed into the city of Wilmington that same year. A renovated dairy barn from 1909 served as its clubhouse, although the structure would later be demolished in 1999.

Although many a golf tournament was held at Echo Farms, it never achieved the status of the fabled Pinehurst courses. In the 1970s and even into the '80s, Echo Farms, though never gated, was almost like an early version of the tony, current-day version of Landfall near Wrightsville Beach.

The golf course was redesigned in the late '90s by Ian Scott Taylor, but by the late 2000s the golf course had become a money pit for the Matrix Development Group, which had bought it in 1995.

In 2016, Matrix announced a plan to close the golf course and build new housing on the site. This met with opposition from some Echo Farms residents, many of whom had moved to the neighborhood specifically for the golf course.

One of those residents was Tony Roberti, who became active in a group known as Save Echo Farms. A New Jersey transplant, Roberti has lived in Wilmington since the early 2000s and in Echo Farms since 2010.

Initially, Roberti said, the idea was to save the golf course, but "we found out early in the game the golf course was never going to be saved."

After many Wilmington City Council meetings as well as face-to-face meetings with Matrix, the group turned its focus to limiting the amount and the kind of development that would replace the golf course, which closed in 2017.

"We had a positive impact," Roberti said, and convinced developers to leave more trees, put in barriers between developments and bring down the planned number of townhouses to 62 from 92.

Partly in response to concerns from Echo Farms residents, in 2018 the city of Wilmington and New Hanover County teamed up to buy 14 acres of former golf course land for $1.7 million. Echo Farms Park and Gardens opened in 2020 and features a public pool and tennis courts, as well as walking trails connecting to residential areas.

Hints of the past remain but time has also marched on

Tara Duckworth, director of New Hanover County's Parks and Gardens department, was project manager for Echo Farms Park. She said that, during construction of the park, longtime residents "brought stuff out to show us," including old pictures from back in the day.

"We certainly tried to keep the flavor of the tennis and the swimming pool," Duckworth said, adding that the walking trails are "heavily used" and will one day link up to a city-wide network of trails.

The county managed the pool at Echo Farms for the first time this past summer, and "we had a huge group that came in every week," she said.

Roberti said he misses the Echo Farms he moved to in 2010. He admits "the golf course was mediocre. There's nicer courses, but it was a good local course ... It's a shame that all that history is kind of gone."

Roberti said he also misses what he recalls as a less congested neighborhood, not to mention a less congested Wilmington in general, before what he calls "storage units, apartments and car washes" took over.

"Like a lot of people, I came down here to get away from traffic, congestion, high prices," Roberti said, adding that he's now looking to move out of the Wilmington area.

Contact John Staton at 910-343-2343 or John.Staton@StarNewsOnline.com.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Founded in 1972, Wilmington's Echo Farms community turns 50 this year