All in the family: some things are thicker than blood: how John McNairy and Felix Harvey run the oldest company on the NC 100.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: North Carolina 100 - Harvey Enterprises - Company Profile

Just beyond LaGrange, Albert Suggs Road angles off the highway through fields of soybean and cotton planted in rows that stretch straight as a poker almost to the horizon. A mile down the road, across railroad tracks in the midst of the big fields, Harvey Gin & Cotton Co.'s tan metal warehouses sprawl.

On a summer morning, Kendall Hill, 64, talks about cotton farming--drought last year, downpours and mud this year--as he checks some of the 1,700 acres he has planted in fields like these north of Kinston. The crop will probably net Tull Hill Farms close to $500,000, but he also has 630 acres of sweet potatoes to harvest. Hill will pay Harvey Gin & Cotton $65 an acre to pick his cotton.

"Wasn't for them, we couldn't be in cotton," he says. Cotton had once been king, before boll weevils and synthetics dethroned it for farmers such as Hill's father, Tull. "I graduated from high school in 1957, and we'd already quit growing any by then." But demand for natural fiber returned, and prices inched up. Harvey Enterprises Inc. saw it coming and invested millions, building the first of its four gins in 1991 and establishing a brokerage to buy, store and sell cotton. Now cotton is back--44,000 acres grows here in Lenoir County--and cotton-related sales brought in more than $15 million of Harvey Enterprises' $201 million revenue last year.

Cotton's demise and rise are change, change creates a chance to make money, and the man who guided the company's return to cotton is the biggest change in its 132-year history. Almost 22 years ago, John O. McNairy became the first person not named Harvey to run the company, one of North Carolina's largest family businesses and No. 22 on this year's North Carolina 100 ranking of private companies. It's also the oldest company on the list. Nobody doubted McNairy's qualifications--business and law degrees, with honors, from UNC Chapel Hill and a partner in his own Atlanta law firm. Some, however, might have doubted his sanity. The man into whose shadow he was stepping, who would remain the company's chairman, was his father-in-law.

Former Gov. Jim Hunt calls C. Felix Harvey III, 83, one of the 10 most-influential business figures in the state. A member of the North Carolina Business Hall of Fame, he doesn't have a shock of tousled hair--he's been bald most of his life--but in some ways he resembles a Kennedy. The scion of a well-to-do family, he prepped at Woodberry Forest, graduated from Carolina and was a naval officer in the South Pacific in World War II. "He has a sixth sense about how to make money," a business associate says. It might be an inherited sense. Since soon after the Civil War, what is today Harvey Enterprises has mined Eastern North Carolina for profit, and the mother lode has been agriculture or rarely more than one step from it--selling insurance and clothing to farmers or trucking and distributing propane gas they use to cure tobacco. It does business in such diverse lines as farm equipment, convenience stores, subprime auto financing and cleaning up leaky underground fuel tanks.

Harvey influence and money run deep in Lenoir and surrounding counties. At tax time a few years ago, Felix Harvey asked Oscar Herring, chairman of the Lenoir County Board of Commissioners, if he knew of any needy churches. Of course, Herring replied. Harvey wrote him checks totaling $300,000 to pass out to them. "They've got money, and all my life, I know, the perception of people in Lenoir County has been that whatever Mr. Harvey wants he gets."

Two decades ago, what Felix Harvey, with two daughters but no sons, wanted was for his son-in-law, then 32, to take over Harvey Enterprises. McNairy hesitated. He was family not by blood but by marriage to Harvey's daughter Leigh. ("Dad tells the story that he was delighted when I told him I was going to marry John," she recalls. "He was thrilled for me, but he also says he was thrilled to get a son-in-law with a CPA and law degree.") McNairy liked his father-in-law, but he knew it was risky going into business with him--the way marriage can spoil a romance. But Mr. Harvey finally got what he wanted.

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