BUILDING THE BEACH
www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com
“I NEVER have stopped and
counted, but I can ride down
to Wrightsville Beach and I
have about two or three on
every street,” says Walt Lackey, the
senior member of the Lackey Build-ers
team. “It makes you very proud.”
With a 45-year history of build-ing
in Wrightsville Beach, it is
no surprise that Walt Lackey has
made an impact on nearly every
street within the town — includ-ing
relocating most of the cottages
within the Historic Square.
Lackey majored in business
administration at Wilmington
College (before it became the
University of North Carolina
Wilmington), but couldn’t find
any jobs that interested him in his
chosen field.
“There wasn’t anything that
appealed to me in that line of
work so I decided to be a carpen-ter
in the meantime, which I had
always enjoyed,” he says. “It ended
up that a bunch of my friends,
Wright Holman being one of
them, all joined up together and
away we went. We just weren’t cut
out for a normal job, we wanted
to work for ourselves.”
Partnering with Holman — the
late Wrightsville-based builder
who Lackey says knew the most
about the architecture of the
beach — was a natural fit.
“He was more the politician
and I was more of the technician,”
Lackey says. “I liked the nuts and
bolts of it, and I think Wright
would have been a good senator
because he loved to talk and he
could sell.”
By Robert Dit tmer
Kyle and Walt Lackey helped prepare the Ewing-Bordeaux cottage for its move to
Wrightsville Beach’’s Historic Square in January 2018. The cottage is now part of the
Wrightsville Beach Museum.
ALLISON POTTER
A Legacy of Giving
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WBM