Dell Murphy and
the business of staying

The family sold the hog business. Four years later, Dell Murphy started another company. The dates are simple: 2000, then 2004. Everything between them makes a more interesting question. What does a family do after selling the enterprise that made its name? In the Murphys’ case, the answer included farms, boats, golf courses, restaurants and the considerable business of keeping other businesses working.

Murphy Family Ventures, based in Wallace, North Carolina, became the management group for that collection. Dell, its founder, president and CEO, occupies an unusual position in the family story. His father helped build the agricultural business. His son has worked his way through the company and into senior leadership. Dell stands between those generations, with responsibilities that extend well beyond the farm gate.

A boatbuilder and a sandwich shop would make curious dinner companions. They make equally curious entries on an organizational chart. Yet both appear in the Murphy business world. That variety gives Dell’s career its particular shape: a family enterprise whose interests have spread, while the work of managing them remains anchored in southeastern North Carolina.

The sale was a comma

The roots reach back to Rose Hill. In 1962, Dell’s father, Wendell Murphy, and grandfather, Holmes Murphy, entered business together. Their beginning was a feed-milling operation serving local farmers. Hog production followed, and the enterprise expanded through contract farming. The family’s business history describes a habit of modest promises followed by dependable delivery. It is an unshowy creed, especially for a company history page.

Other members of the family helped broaden those interests. Wendell’s siblings, Harry “Pete” Murphy and Joyce Murphy Minchew, were part of the expansion beyond farming. Some businesses were created; others were acquired. By the time Dell assembled a management group, he was dealing with a family whose commercial life already contained more than one kind of work.

The original hog business was sold to Smithfield Foods in 2000. Dell founded Murphy Family Ventures in 2004. Keeping those two events separate matters. His company belongs to the next chapter, with a role built around organizing and supporting business operations. A sale can simplify a family’s balance sheet while leaving its working life decidedly complicated.

The work behind the names

The group’s current company list ranges from Admiral Outdoor Advertising to Albemarle Boats, Bill Carone Cars, River Landing and the Mad Boar Restaurant & Pub. There is an inn, a building company and Village Store & Subs. World Line Networks brings technology into the mix. This is a portfolio a person can encounter on a road, on the water, over lunch or while moving into a house.

Different businesses have different customers and rhythms. The common ground lies in the tasks that recur behind the scenes. Payroll still arrives on schedule. Accounts need attention. Buildings and equipment need maintenance. Staff need support. Dell’s founding decision put management at the center of a family enterprise whose outward appearances could scarcely be more varied.

The farm-management division makes that work particularly concrete. Its services include staffing, production management, maintenance, accounting and information technology. It also handles land and nutrient management, with planning, monitoring and compliance responsibilities. The operation covers multiple stages of swine production, alongside poultry. Each item sounds ordinary until somebody has to make sure it happens.

That is the less photogenic side of the business. A new boat is easy to admire. An orderly set of accounts rarely attracts a crowd. Yet the management group exists to help enterprises meet their daily obligations. For Dell, the central project has been to give those different operations a structure through which their practical needs can be handled.

A place measured in anniversaries

River Landing gives the story a longer clock. Writing for its silver anniversary in 2021, Dell reflected on the families who had become residents and members, as well as the employees who worked there. He emphasized that the family had continued investing through years when other developers had left golf courses and clubs behind.

“We have continued to invest in this special place.”

Dell Murphy, River Landing anniversary message, 2021

He also looked ahead to a golden anniversary another 25 years away. That is a revealing horizon for a business message. Twenty-five years is long enough for a child to grow up and for a familiar building to require serious attention. His ambition for River Landing was expressed in the language of a place that would still be there.

The employees provide another way of measuring time. In 2024, Dell helped recognize Wayne Rich for 30 years of service. He praised Rich’s range of talents and added a short personal judgment: “He’s a wonderful human being.” An anniversary award can be ceremonial. That sentence gives it a more human weight.

In 2025, Dell was pictured with farm manager Jane Munoz and her team as she reached 35 years. Her career began in 1990, before Murphy Family Ventures existed. The dates show how staff experience can stretch across changes in corporate organization. A company may have a founding year; the people inside it can carry a much longer memory.

River Landing’s own anniversary coverage also includes Dell recognizing hospitality leader Larry George. Taken together, these appearances show a CEO repeatedly participating in the recognition of colleagues. The job titles vary, from farm management to club operations. The occasion remains familiar: somebody has spent years doing work that the business depends upon.

Beyond the company gates

Dell’s public responsibilities extend to the North Carolina Youth Outdoor Engagement Commission, which he chairs. The commission’s published roster lists him as an Agriculture Commissioner appointee from Duplin County, with a term running from October 2023 through September 2027. It is a statewide responsibility attached to a businessman whose home base remains Wallace.

The commission funds outdoor learning through grants and programs. Its work includes school field trips, outdoor clubs and activities such as hiking, camping, fishing and archery. Behind the appealing idea of getting children outside sits another set of practical requirements: schools need resources, programs need organization and public money requires oversight. Even an afternoon outdoors can have an administrative life.

The education connection also runs through Dell’s wife, Wendy. Together they established the Wendy & Dell Murphy Distinguished Professorship in Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. The appointment supports teaching, scholarship and engagement in the Watson College of Education. Their names are attached to an academic position with work to do beyond an unveiling.

In May 2025, Denise Ousley-Exum was named the college’s Murphy Distinguished Scholar. Her work included the Teaching with Joy Network, which brought teachers together around instructional practice. For the Murphys’ giving, that announcement supplied a specific, continuing outcome: an endowment supporting someone engaged in the everyday questions of education.

Closer to home, Wendell, Dell and Wen contributed to the Wallace Fire Department in 2024, supporting additional training for volunteer firefighters. The three names appear together again, this time attached to a local service. It is a small geographic circle with a practical purpose, and another example of the family acting across generations.

Three generations, one frame

A photograph taken at a Wallace farm puts Wendell, Dell and Wen side by side. The family resemblance is only part of its interest. It gathers the generation associated with the original agricultural enterprise, the founder of the management company and the son taking on a larger executive role. Business succession rarely fits quite so neatly into a frame.

Wen’s promotion to executive vice president and senior director of support operations was reported in September 2025. His experience had begun while he was in high school. He worked as a prep chef and herd technician, managed a breeding department and later became a maintenance project manager. The route to leadership passed through kitchens, farms and equipment.

Those jobs connect the family relationship to the company’s actual operations. A surname explains kinship. A sequence of responsibilities explains something about preparation. Wen’s appointment adds another stage to the enterprise Dell created, with support operations once again prominent in the title. The family’s next chapter arrives with tasks attached.

Dell’s own public appearances retain a similarly practical setting. At a 2025 dinner for new farm owner partners, he joined his family and the support team for a pig-pickin’. The meal makes an apt detail in this story. There are elaborate ways to introduce a business relationship. In this instance, the welcome came with the family’s agricultural roots plainly on the table.

The appeal of Dell Murphy’s story lies in the work that follows the milestone. A business is sold. Another is organized. An employee reaches an anniversary. A son accepts more responsibility. A professorship continues into a new appointment. Each event opens onto obligations that will still need attention the following morning.

Wallace is where those threads come together. From there, Dell has built a company around the management of a varied family enterprise, while participating in institutions that teach, train and welcome people beyond it. His River Landing message looked a quarter-century ahead. For a story full of anniversaries, that is a fitting direction to face.