Ward Burton, the 2002 Daytona 500 winner, has never been tied to a headline-making mansion purchase. His home base is Halifax County in Southside Virginia, near South Boston, the town he calls home. The property most closely linked to him is the Cove, a horseshoe of land on the Staunton River that he camped on as a boy, later lived on in pioneer style, and eventually turned into the core of his wildlife foundation. Wikipedia also lists a second home on the Outer Banks, in Nags Head, North Carolina.
2,100 acres
Halifax County, VA7.5 miles of river frontageStaunton River
The Cove, the riverfront tract Burton protected and the base of the Ward Burton Wildlife Foundation, as described in 2005.
Ward Burton House: Halifax County Roots
Burton was born on October 25, 1961. Wikipedia gives two birthplaces in different sections, Danville in one and South Boston in the infobox, but either way he considers South Boston his hometown. When he was appointed to Virginia’s Board of Game and Inland Fisheries in 2005, he took the seat as a resident of Halifax County. Appalachian Voices also described him as a Halifax resident in 2002, the year of his Daytona win.
South Boston returned the loyalty. In 2002 the town put up a “Welcome to South Boston” marker honoring Virginia’s first Daytona 500 winner, a public tribute rather than anything to do with where he sleeps.
Anyone searching for a Ward Burton house listing will come up short: no major real estate outlet has reported a purchase price, square footage or listing for his Virginia residence, and none is given here. Wikipedia says he owns several thousand acres of hunting land in rural Virginia close to South Boston, which fits everything else on record: the Burton story is about land, not a showpiece house.
The Cove on the Staunton River
The Cove sits in a bend of the Staunton River, which wraps the property on all sides and leaves a single access road. Burton started going there around age 12, when his parents dropped him off on Friday afternoons and collected him on Sundays. He spent those weekends in a wooden shanty on land owned by his childhood mentor, C.R. Sanders, according to novelist Sharyn McCrumb, who wrote about the property in 2005 while co-authoring a book with him.
That was a choice, not a necessity. McCrumb noted that Burton grew up in a suburban neighborhood and that his family was in the construction business, with no family farm. Appalachian Voices reported in 2002 that, before his racing success, he lived in a shack in the woods with no electricity or running water, and that as an adult he went back to the Cove and lived there pioneer-style for two years.
The land eventually came close to being broken up. The owner had fallen about five years behind on taxes, and a bank planned to sell 350 acres to cover the debt. McCrumb wrote that Burton was given a week to raise the money, so he timbered 60 acres of Cove forest and sold the lumber to stop the sale. He kept adding to that first piece until the tract reached about 2,100 acres.
The property is not a blank wilderness. Appalachian Voices described a plantation home built in the late 1700s, centuries-old oaks and an elm estimated at about 150 years old. McCrumb added that the ground had been farmed for more than a century, with forests cleared and wetlands drained, and that Burton’s restoration work included replanting native grasses and rebuilding waterfowl habitat. Black bear, bobcat, fox, beaver, turkey and white-tailed deer use the land, and a bald eagle has been spotted there.
Burton and the Cove
- c. 1973Spends weekends alone at the Cove, around age 12
- 1994Moves up to NASCAR’s Winston Cup Series
- 1996Founds the Ward Burton Wildlife Foundation
- 2002Wins the Daytona 500; South Boston erects a marker in his honor
- Dec 2003Foundation receives a Forest Legacy grant for easements on 1,100 acres $1M
- 2005Joins Virginia’s Board of Game and Inland Fisheries as a Halifax County resident
From One Riverfront Tract to 11,000 Acres
Burton set up the Ward Burton Wildlife Foundation in 1996, two years after reaching the Cup Series gave him the money to act on his conservation plans. The Cove became its base, and conservation easements now restrict development there. The December 2003 Forest Legacy grant was one of fewer than 40 awarded nationwide that year, McCrumb wrote.
The foundation has grown well beyond that first tract. Its website now says it owns and manages more than 11,000 acres and has helped landowners conserve over 87,000 acres in Virginia and Pennsylvania. It remains based in the town of Halifax, and an archaeology project, the Sanders Site, runs on its Halifax County property.
The Nags Head Beach House
Wikipedia states that Burton also has a home in Nags Head, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Details are thin. A user-submitted entry on the mapping site Virtual Globetrotting labels a Nags Head house as his former part-time home and says it sold in 2016 for $975,000.
Unconfirmed sale claim
The 2016 sale figure comes from a crowd-sourced listing, not a news report or property record we could check. Treat it as unverified, and note that it conflicts with Wikipedia’s present-tense description of a Nags Head home.
Some search results for this topic also mix Burton up with historic “Ward” and “Burton” houses in Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia. Those buildings have no connection to the NASCAR driver.
A Racing Family With Southside Ties
Ward married Tabitha Conner in January 1990, and the couple have three children: Sarah, Jeb and Ashton. Jeb followed him into NASCAR, and Ward’s younger brother Jeff and nephew Harrison also raced. Plenty of Cup drivers settle near the race shops around Charlotte, as with Kyle Larson’s place in Mooresville, North Carolina. Ward stayed rooted in rural Virginia, close to the river land he first camped on as a kid.
Sources
- Appalachian Voices (June 2002): Halifax residency, early life at the Cove, plantation home, wildlife, foundation founding in 1996.
- Appalachian Voices, Sharyn McCrumb (September 2005): 2,100 acres, 7.5 miles of river frontage, the 350-acre rescue, Forest Legacy grant.
- Wikipedia (accessed October 2026): birth, hometown, Halifax County residency, hunting land, Nags Head home, family.
- Ward Burton Wildlife Foundation (accessed October 2026): current acreage, Halifax base, Sanders Site project.
- Historical Marker Database: 2002 South Boston marker honoring his Daytona 500 win.
- Virtual Globetrotting (undated, user-submitted): unverified 2016 Nags Head sale claim.
