by Katie Orlando



Stepping down as mayor of Davidson in 2007 hasn’t stopped Randy Kincaid’s work for the community.

Randy Kincaid was first elected to the Davidson Town Board in 1977. He became mayor in 1997. He served for 10 years before passing the torch to Mayor John Woods in 2007.

“If you can’t do it in 10 years, you can’t do it,” Kincaid said of the decision to step down.

Kincaid has seen the town’s population balloon from 3,000 to around 11,000 today, and he was part of the team that worked to control that growth in Davidson.



“Smart growth is a tool to build community,” Kincaid said. “Anything that brings people together, we tried to do. Anything that keeps people apart, we tried not to do.”

To further that goal, Kincaid’s town board kept gates out of subdivisions and drive-through windows and four-lane roads out of Davidson. They worked to build sidewalks and parks and encouraged organizations where people work together like schools and churches.

“When you’re in Davidson you know that you’re some place,” Kincaid said.

Since stepping down in 2007, Kincaid’s wife died and he remarried, adding four step grandchildren. He spends a lot of time with them and his five grandchildren in Winston Salem and Chapel Hill.

A former usher at Davidson College Presbyterian Church, he is now stepping into the co-chair position of the church’s planning committee. He participates in the church’s Conversational Bridge and 50s-plus dinner group.

A Quincy, Fla. native, Kincaid moved to Davidson in 1967 to teach economics at Davidson College. He still teaches in the business school there, as well as at Queen’s College. He divided his career among teaching, town government and his first wife’s Statesville nursery, Farmhouse Gardeners.

Kincaid chaired the Library Funding Committee two years ago, selling sponsored bricks to save the Davidson branch library. Now he’s starting on a new committee to make Davidson a center for lifelong learning, bringing together existing ongoing education programs and filling in the gaps.

Did you know?

Davidson is known to have one of the most engaged communities in the region, and a number of its public servants have had careers that stretch across decades. But, did you know every Davidson mayor since 1951 has served on the town board before being elected to the town’s top office? The last mayor to not serve on the town board before being elected was E.A. Beaty, who first became mayor in Oct. 1940.