ROWAN COUNTY – Dan Nicholas was a man who wore a lot of hats in Rowan County: horse breeder, real estate mogul, businessman, orange grower. Maybe the most well-known part of his legacy in the county, however, is the park that bears his name on Bringle Ferry Road in the eastern part of the county.

Nicholas donated 200 acres to the county in 1967, after unsuccessfully trying to donate the land to the Jaycees, who did not have the capability to provide upkeep, and the city of Salisbury, who did not want to own a park so far outside the city limits. In the end, he was able to convince the members of the Rowan County Board of Commissioners to take the land off his hands by taking them out to a steak dinner.

“Dan Nicholas is probably the only man in town who ever had to pay somebody to take something for nothing,” Salisbury Post reporter Ned Cline wrote at the time.

In the time between 1967 and 1970, when Nicholas died, he continued to donate the money for more and more land to be added to the park. By the end of his life, the park had ballooned to 312 acres.

The idea for the park came to him while he was sitting under a tree at a park in Roanoke, Virginia, watching his grandkids play.

“Dan said, ‘Murtis, what do you think about giving that property? It sure would make a prettier park than this,’” Nicholas’s wife, Murtis, told Post reporter Mark Wineka in 1982.

Nowadays, the park is closer to 450 acres, just one way in which Nicholas’ donation has continued to improve upon his initial vision in the last 54 years. Murtis had her hand on the steering wheel for much of that development as a member of the Rowan Parks and Recreation Commission.

Murtis died in 1988. By that time, the park had added picnic shelters with grills, a basketball court, horseshoe pits, volleyball courts, ball fields, miniature golf, playgrounds, fishing, paddle boats, a nature and environmental center, nature trails, animal exhibits, a gift shop, log cabin, family campground, Girl Scouts hut, tennis courts and an outdoor theater.

Rowan County has worked to improve the park since then as well. The park has added six log cabins for indoor camping throughout the years. Hurley Station was built in the 1990s and train tracks were built right behind the station, where tickets and souvenirs are sold. A carousel was built right next door just a few years later. Miner Moose Gem Mine was built and opened in 2000, and now serves as one of the main attractions for field trips and general visitors.

The gift shop was turned into a concession stand. Approximately 50 years after it was built, it now serves as storage. A new multi-purpose building, including the new concession stand, was built overlooking the lake. The wooden paddle boat dock was torn down and replaced in recent years as well.

One of the larger projects in the park is one that is under construction currently, an expansion of the red wolf enclosure inside of Rowan Wild. Construction on the project began in early February. Megan Cline, the supervisor of Rowan Wild’s nature center, said in October that the project would mainly allow the enclosure to hold more wolves, especially in an emergency situation. Currently, the vast majority of red wolves live on the eastern coast of North Carolina, where they are susceptible to having their environments disrupted by storms or even hurricanes.

All of these revisions and improvements mean that the park that Dan Nicholas built, the park that outshined the one he enjoyed so much in Roanoke, Virginia, has continuously evolved while staying true to its original mission. What started as a few picnic shelters beside a lake, which was renamed Lake Murtis in 1982, has evolved into one of Rowan County’s most popular attractions.

At the event held to honor the renaming of the lake, a few attendees told Wineka that they found it hard to believe that the park had attracted 2 million visitors in the 15 years since Nicholas’ donation. Nowadays, the park sees that number in approximately three years, with the county stating on its website that the average annual attendance is close to 700,000. Forty thousand of those come for Autumn Jubilee, a massive annual festival they put on. The park also often brings in over 100,000 students on field trips, who visit the gem mine and Rowan Wild.

“I know he knows and that he is here. He just loved the park and he was so proud when they named it after him,” Murtis Nicholas told Wineka in the same article.