Fare ways.

• Author: Barnes, Billy E.
• Position: Bull Creek Golf and Country Club

An extended family puts its land to new use - betting the farm on a bumper crop of greens.

Bull Creek Golf and Country Club is a 170-acre family dream wrapped around a dead-end country road near Louisburg. If you visit, you might get a bouncy ride in a weathered dump truck driven by 54-year-old Zollie Gill.

He'll point out the No. 3 green "where the hog pens used to be," and a clump of trees in the middle of the fairway "where we used to skin our beef cattle after the first freeze." An old tobacco barn peeks out from the woods bordering the eighth fairway, and at the bottom of the hill there's a catfish pond that now serves as a water hazard.

In 1924, a farmer named Zollie Massenburg bought 75 acres in Franklin County where he and his wife, Martha, raised cotton, potatoes, tobacco and 14 children. Today, seven families of Massenburg descendants and relatives live in sturdy brick houses at the end of Massenburg-Baker Road. There was a time when the white dots in their yards were windblown cotton bolls; today they're errant golf balls.

Like many small farmers in Eastern North Carolina, they found they could no longer make a decent living raising low volumes of tobacco, cotton, corn and soy-beans. And the young generation had little interest in doing so. Most of the families had given up on farming five years ago, taking up white-collar jobs such as schoolteacher, county magistrate and small-business owner. They leased their land, which brought in barely enough to cover taxes. Still, they weren't willing to part with property that had been in the family for generations.

So they turned it into a golf course - one of only a handful of black-owned courses in the country. It's a long hop from hog pens and tobacco barns to manicured greens with underground sprinklers, but the families are staking their savings and their land on making it work. They've poured $900,000 into opening nine holes. It will take an additional $600,000, they estimate, to finish the back nine and a clubhouse.

Bull Creek, which opened in October, is the toil and pride of three generations. Weddings through the years have brought in new names, but all of the investors are family by blood or by marriage. Just as Old Man Massenburg left rich farm land to his descendants, these families are growing a new legacy in the same fields.

The CEO is Sam Solomon, 58, a slim, necktie-wearing man who married into the Massenburgs. He lived in New Jersey for 17 years, returned to Franklin County in 1977 and built a big brick house that now has a golf course for a backyard. Though confident he can make Bull Creek a success, he's hanging onto his day job as a junior-high vocational-education teacher.

His key partner is the family's patriarch, Warren Massenburg, 71, a broad-shouldered, no-nonsense man and last surviving son of Grandpa Massenburg. He owns three rest homes and raises cattle on the side. He also is chairman of the Franklin County school board. His right-hand man is nephew Zollie Gill. He's the one who likes to show visitors where the tobacco-plant bed used to lie - right in the middle of what's now the No. 2 fairway.

Twenty years ago, Gill was the family's only golfer. For a long time he looked at those rolling hills, the creek and the lake and...