It's a warm day in early October, about 4:30 in the afternoon, and a doe and spring fawn are grazing the clover about 50 yards to Ward's left. Several wild turkeys scamper for cover as Ward pulls the big Dodge to the edge of the field to watch the deer. It's the end of an afternoon spent driving two visitors around The Cove and showing them the wildlife management techniques in place on the property. The turkey sightings and grazing deer come at just the right time, offering Ward and his visitors final brushstrokes on a gorgeous fall afternoon.
"Just down the road there are going to be fewer and fewer places left like this, places where you can pull up and see deer grazing only 50 yards away," Ward says.
Ward learned early to appreciate such moments, having spent his youth living a life full of the things that novelist William Faulkner and other Southern writers have captured in their work-Southern things, of land and hunting and heritage and growing up in the country. Ward constantly roamed the woods and rolling hills around Halifax as a child, not just frolicking in child's play but applying the things he learned from his grandfather and actually learning to live off the land.
"As a child, that's the only thing I thought about," Ward says of being outdoors and learning about wildlife. "My parents had gotten so comfortable with me that when I was 9 years old I was spending the night by myself out in the woods, out behind the house."
As he grew into his early teens, many weekends were spent camping in The Cove. His parents, John and Meredith, would drop him off on Friday afternoon when school let out, then return to pick him up on Sunday afternoon.
Those same woods would beckon him back later in life. After graduating from Hargrave Military Academy, where he became first lieutenant and was ranked first on the school's rifle team, Ward spent over two years at Elon College, near Greensboro, North Carolina. He decided to drop out, though, and he headed back to Halifax, to everything that was familiar and good. He returned to The Cove.
"I just didn't have a real good direction in life," he says. "When I quit Elon, I just wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life, and that's why I came out here. Things are easily understood for me, things are simpler outdoors. I just kind of went back to my roots, to what my passion was when I was a child."
He spent over two years in The Cove, living alone in a cabin with no electricity or running water, hunting, fishing, trapping. Using the lessons he learned from his grandfather. Indulging his passion for the outdoors.
"It cleared my head," he says. "I wasn't worried any more about what I was going to do."
Turning Laps
Ward was in his early twenties and living a contented life in The Cove. Stock car racing was nowhere in his plans. Instead of chasing checkered flags, as younger brother Jeff was doing at nearby South Boston Speedway, Ward was hunting, fishing and searching for beaver, otter and raccoons along the Staunton River.
"I trapped for a living during the three and a half months of trapping season," Ward says. "I made a decent living, but I didn't have a lot of responsibility other than to keep myself fed."
While living in the woods as a grown man and even as a boy roaming those same woods, Ward says he had a sense that something on a larger scale was going to happen in his life. He just didn't know what. It all began to come together in 1985 when he traded his trap lines for a shovel and a steady paycheck, emerging from the woods and hiring on as a laborer in the construction company his grandfather had started, which by then was being run by Ward's father.
The next few years were critical to shaping the Ward Burton known to the general public today.