For the past 70 years, six little houses on Carol Drive sat in solitude off Battlefield Boulevard South in the Hickory area of Chesapeake.
Farmland surrounded them on the northern and southern sides. A ditch and a towering swath of trees still line the backyards, creating a barrier of sorts.
Gail Gastón remembered her childhood on Carol Drive: running through sprinklers and watching the cars heading south to the Outer Banks — long before the bypass was built.
“Everyone used to say ‘Y’all live in the country,’ ” she said.
But that remoteness is disappearing.
Construction vehicles now travel the once rural road daily to make way for two developments cropping up on the 89 acres that used to be part of Warren Farms.
Ryan Homes is building Patriot’s Ridge off Henry Jefferson Way to the north of Carol Drive. The community will consist of 99 single-family homes, a pool, clubhouse, walking trails and parks. Homes start in the upper $500,000s.
The other neighborhood, Patriot’s Walke, is slated to occupy the land directly south of Carol Drive where cornstalks once filled the field. That development will have 135 dwellings — 90 single-family homes and 45 townhomes. Plans include 64,000 square feet of retail space on the main road.
By 2045, the city is projected to add roughly 50,000 residents, a 20% population growth to nearly 300,000.
“So, available inventory of housing is certainly critical to anticipating the future needs,” Chesapeake Planning Director Jimmy McNamara said
The city is in the middle of updating its comprehensive plan to outline its future, including housing.
‘Last ones standing’
Geraldine and Joseph Holloway on the front porch of their Chesapeake home across from a massive construction site Tuesday, July 29, 2025. (Stephen M. Katz / The Virginian-Pilot)
Geraldine Holloway, 88, and her husband, Joseph, 100, are the remaining original residents on the street.
“We’re the last ones standing of the older generation,” Geraldine said. “Everybody else has died out.”
She moved into the house at 112 Carol Drive in 1959 with her five children, including Gail, just four years after the houses were built. Joseph Holloway, a World War II veteran who served as a Navy Seabee, joined the family in 1960.
The cluster of homes was once intended to be part of a larger neighborhood called Regal Park, but that never came to fruition.
“It’s been quiet and peaceful for a long time,” Geraldine said. “I’m for growth, but you don’t know what’s coming now. We’re just waiting to see how it’s going to be.”
While the couple is settled after all these years, they said they wouldn’t have minded an offer to buy their house as part of the development project so they could move into a retirement home.
The Carol Drive homeowners have since reached out to the builder about the possibility of buying their homes. But for now, the Holloways sit on their front porch to catch a bit of a breeze and watch the dirt swirling in the summer heat.
They see the growth taking place before them. They watch the bulldozers and excavators clearing the land and the street torn up for eventual repaving.
And they see the six little houses on Carol Drive being swallowed up by what many call progress.
“This whole area has stayed still and now it’s turned over with time,” Joseph said.
‘Nothin’ but dust’
Ryan Bray was born and raised in southern Chesapeake. He recalled driving past the quaint street and seeing upward of 50 deer nibbling on the soybeans growing on the farmland.
“Now, you don’t see nothin’ but dust,” he said, referring to the site work dirt.
Six years ago, Bray moved into 116 Carol Drive. Two years later, he went before the Planning Commission to oppose the development. His neighbors call him the mayor of Carol Drive.
City Council had approved the rezoning for Patriot’s Ridge in November 2020.
Then developer Hearndon Construction reached an agreement, put in writing, with the Carol Drive residents in November 2021 to mitigate their concerns and garner their support for the rezoning of the Patriot’s Walke land in front of their homes from agricultural to residential. The agreement stipulated that the homeowners could not take action that would cause a denial of the rezoning. The City Council approved it in February 2022.
But after Hearndon pulled out of the projects, everything stalled.
Developer Allied Properties, in partnership with homebuilder Ryan Homes, acquired and took over the Patriot’s Ridge and Patriot’s Walke developments. Construction began on Patriot’s Ridge in 2023 and site work began on Patriot’s Walke within the past year.
Within three months of the start of Patriot’s Walke’s construction, Bray said all of the Carol Drive septic tanks went into failure and several wells went dry. As part of the agreement with the original developer, each home had received $12,000 for the cost of connecting to public water and sewer services.
But Bray said the hookup was supposed to be available within 18 months — before recent inflation since the agreement nearly four years ago. The city, according to a July 23 memo, told the contractor it would help facilitate a partial activation of water and sewer facilities to expedite service to Carol Drive.
The agreement also said that residents would receive free membership for the Patriot’s Walke homeowner’s association and have access to recreational amenities. The new developer plans to honor that remaining obligation, said Justin Old of Quality Homes of Currituck, an affiliate of Allied Properties.
“When the time comes to formally record this, we fully intend to reach out to a representative of the residents to ensure this is properly documented and honored,” Old said in an email.
Additional verbal clarifications from Hearndon Construction to the residents, they said, included relocating overhead utilities underground. Instead, the new developer had the utilities placed on taller overhead poles, leaving residents concerned they could reach the homes if they fell. Old said the new development team can only go by what had been written when it acquired the project.
And the residents’ 20-foot paved rural road is being replaced with a city standard suburban road with sidewalks — placing the improvements within close proximity to their homes.
Joseph Holloway walks up the front steps to his Chesapeake home across from a massive construction site Tuesday, July 29, 2025. (Stephen M. Katz / The Virginian-Pilot)
The changing times
All of this has Bray — and the other residents of Carol Drive — frustrated.
“The city didn’t tell us when it’s supposed to start, when it’s supposed to end, when we’re going to have water, when we’re going to have sewer, but we have to deal with the problems by ourselves,” Bray said.
The city wasn’t involved in the private agreement and wouldn’t be able to enforce conditions not related to development, said Jay Tate, director of development and permits. Still, Tate met with the homeowners in July and communicated unresolved issues in a memo sent to City Council and an agent for the developer. The various entities involved had made it difficult for the homeowners to know whom to contact.
Ryan Homes also asked for a proffer modification for Patriot’s Walke, and Deputy City Manager Brian Solis advised City Council on July 9 that citizens’ concerns be reconciled before considering it, according to the memo. Ryan Homes’ Ryan Sheplee declined to speak with The Virginian-Pilot. The builder has a history of not speaking with media.
The impact of the construction has led Bray ready to say goodbye to Carol Drive — a place he hoped to call home forever — and put a contract on a house in Camden County in North Carolina.
“I can’t, for the life of me, understand why they don’t just buy our houses,” Bray said in a July 23 interview.
Firefighter Richard Gayheart said he doesn’t have any plans to go anywhere — for now. He and his son moved into the house at the end of Carol Drive nine years ago. It’s the only place Weston, 9, has ever called home.
“It’s been great,” Gayheart said, as he looked out over the adjacent area and reminisced how he and his son watched the crop dusters fly over.
Gone are the days when Weston used to ride his dirt bike and four-wheeler all around the fields and woods.
As construction vehicles noisily made their way past, Gayheart said, “This sucks, but it’s all right.”
He recalled going to the City Council meeting and came away feeling that if there is land, the city would allow building on it.
One positive: He realizes his property value will increase with the development.
Sandra J. Pennecke, 757-652-5836, sandra.pennecke@pilotonline.com
