Four members of a family who ran a large farm in North Carolina that supplied markets and hosted local vendor festivals were killed on Monday afternoon when the small plane they were in crashed, officials said.
The plane went down about 1:30 p.m. in a field in Lee County in central North Carolina near the Raleigh Executive Jetport in Sanford, the State Highway Patrol said.
Travis W. Buchanan and Candace Buchanan, both 35, and their children, Aubrey, 10, and Walker, 9, were the only occupants in the airplane, it said.
Three of the four occupants died at the crash site, and the fourth person was pronounced dead at a hospital, the Highway Patrol said.
Mr. Buchanan was piloting the Cirrus SR22T, a small single-engine aircraft, which took off from Merritt Island, Fla., at 11 a.m. When it was several miles south of the airport in Sanford, the airport received a notification that the plane was losing radio communications, an official said.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the cause of the crash, which occurred in a heavily wooded area. The agency expected to examine the aircraft on Tuesday and move it to a secure facility.
The crash came a day after several tornadoes swept through the area, as a tropical depression dumped heavy rain and caused severe flooding in the state.
By midday on Monday, preliminary information from sensors at the airport recorded clear skies and visibility of more than 10 miles, according to Tom Green, a meteorologist with the Weather Service.
The family-run Buchanan Farm was a fixture of the farming community in the Sanford area, about 40 miles southwest of Raleigh. It sold Christmas trees and pumpkins in the winter and fall, and flowers for Easter in the spring. Watermelon festivals, with space for local vendors, cropped up in the summer.
The farm trucked fruits and vegetables to neighborhoods in Lee County and beyond. Children were invited to play in the irrigation system on the farm, whose fields grew tobacco and soybeans.
On Tuesday, the farm’s Facebook page, usually replete with comments about bicolor corn and sweet strawberries, was filled instead with condolence messages.
Some remembered the support the family gave to small-business owners from their farm stand in Broadway, a small town south of Sanford along the Lee and Harnett County line.
One of them was Mackenzie Canady, 23, who started MeMe’s Bakery in Sanford when she was 17. In 2023, the Buchanans gave her space on their shelves to sell her pound cake and cinnamon rolls.
“They brought a different spin of community to the rural area and made sure there were events going on all the time,” she said in an interview. “They were honestly the first ones to get our community together on a regular basis.”
Christine Hauser is a Times reporter who writes breaking news stories, features and explainers.
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