Posted: December 23, 2009

By Michael Schwartz

michael.schwartz@insidebiz.com

Considering the thousands of banks that have failed in U.S. history as victims of the Great Depression, the savings and loan crisis and the present recession, 90-year old Farmers Bank in Windsor is a rarity.

Founded in 1919 to serve the rural town of Windsor, it survived each of those crises.

If you thought Windsor was a small town now, imagine what it was like back then.

The railroad ran through the town in those days and Route 460 was a dirt road.

Community banks served a single community. There were no branching laws permitting more than one branch of a given bank. So Windsor, along with its neighboring towns around Isle of Wight County and Western Tidewater, each had their own bank.

Shirley Holland was one of the bank's six organizers, its CEO and its lone employee for its first eight years until 1927 brought a second worker.

"He posted the checks and cleaned up in the afternoons," said Dick Holland, Shirley Holland's grandson and the current president and CEO.

The Holland family name is part of another rarity in the banking world. Farmers Bank has had three CEOs, all Holland men beginning with grandfather Shirley, son Richard and Dick, the grandson.

Richard Holland joined the bank in 1951. He took over as president and CEO in 1967, the same year the bank opened its first drive-through.

With no previous desire to get into the family business, Dick Holland realized that coaching football for $6,500 a year wasn't a smart way to raise a family. So he came to work at the bank in 1977.

Like his grandfather in the early days, Dick wore many hats.

"I came in as a teller," he said. "I filed checks. I changed the light bulbs."

In 1985 Dick was named president of the bank, succeeding his father.

The bank began to venture out of Windsor with a branch in Smithfield in the mid-'90s and then into Suffolk in the early part of this decade with a branch on - you guessed it - Holland Road.

Farmers Bank is now a $430 million bank with 90 employees and five branches, "which by all accounts is a very small institution," Holland said. "But we like it that way."

The decision to stay small hasn't been easy. Over the years the bank has been constantly approached as an acquisition target.

"We've had opportunities to sell," Holland said. "We decided against that. Our commitment is to the community."

Selling out to a larger bank would likely erase the heritage of the bank that still serves some of the same families it has had as customers since its beginning, Holland said, up to four generations.