"Hope you're not putting those signs out," she said as he shuffled the placards across his property. She wasn't ready for a 10th contest, another four years tacked onto his three-decade stint on the Holly Springs Town Council.

No, Nancy - just putting them away, he replied.

"I got to stay with my wife. Best let it go," the former councilman said last week, just hours before his last night as a council member.

Nancy is a firm, welcoming woman who knows what she wants. Parrish, better known as "Ham," has watched, listened and occasionally argued through hundreds of meetings that transformed a once-tiny town.

Together they've lived in a small rancher in the heart of Holly Springs - "30, 40, 45 years," Ham said - while ranks of new homes spread into the woods.

"We're getting older and need to spend more time together," Nancy Womble said last week. "He doesn't need to be stressed behind that mess."

Ham Womble seemed a little weary of the job himself. "I enjoyed it better a long time back," he said. There was less arguing, he said, and he fondly remembers group trips to a municipal conference in Washington, D.C., when the entire board piled into his 1988 Chevrolet van.

Over the years, the Holly Springs native became a direct line to town government, especially for residents of the town's first neighborhoods.

He's a history book, the person even the oldest newcomers turn to. "Go ask Ham, he knows," is a local refrain. Even in his final days on the council, residents approached with pleas about the signs in front of a business or a trailer on their street.

After his retirement, he said, "well, they'll do it anyway." They ring the telephone and the doorbell, catch him at the post office or on his fast-food lunch runs.

"People like to talk to him, to listen to him," Nancy Womble said. "They just respect him."

Womble doesn't mind. He graciously took a reporter for a ride last week, unraveling the town's history as he drove past subdivisions and shopping centers, to the covered-over landfill that overlooks Holly Springs.

A deep history

"I was born here. I used to hunt and run and play. I know everyone, all the people that owned the land," he said in his baritone tumble of words.

He recalls the debates that spawned the Rite-Aid and Walmart. He voted for the water service that transformed the once poor, predominately black area.

And Womble, the county's first black sheriff's deputy, led the creation of the Holly Springs Police Department. "I had a handshake in everything we have," Womble said.

Most of his fellow natives are gone now, driven out by a dearth of jobs, then lured away by developers' money. Longtime residents of Princetown, Utleytown and Utley Hill, "they moved to Angier, Willow Spring," Womble said, his pickup cruising the thin woods at the edge of town. "There was a whole line of houses here."

Not done with politics

Womble likes the town's changes but worries Holly Springs one day will sprawl too far. He has asked about a moratorium on development, and he still wants to see a district election system in town, which would allow individual areas to elect their own leaders. That would improve the odds for black council candidates, and Womble thinks it would benefit the town.

His departure from the council won't be the end of his politics, he said. He won't be at every meeting, but he'll advocate for residents, he said, between tending his garden, his towing service and spending more time with Nancy. As he steps back, he said, he wants residents to step forward and speak.

"It's going to take the citizens to get on the councilmen to get what they want," he said. "The more, the merrier."

Though his hometown has changed unrecognizably, he looks back with pride.

"This is amazing," he said. "I worked hard to get this."