BillLindau

The Sandhills Needs Another Beatrix Potter

The recent movie “Miss Potter” played at the Sunrise Theater. It was coincidental that this biopic of the famous children’s author played in Moore County the same week that a moratorium on development became a key issue with the county commissioners. Beatrix Potter, the early 19th-century author of “Peter Rabbit” became quite a conservationist in the wake of her artistic success. She purchased a farm in the district where her family spent their summers. In the movie, the author (one of Renee Zellweger’s best performances) outbids a developer for another nearby farm in England’s Lake District, offering 3,000 pounds, an outrageous amount in 1904. That leaves the developer fuming mad and some members in the audience clapping.
In real life, Beatrix Potter bought up and bequeathed a number of rural tracts of land to Great Britain’s National Trust upon her death. The United Kingdom in the early 1900s had a problem with rampant development, acres upon acres of farmland was being chopped up for commercial and residential development.
The same thing has, unfortunately, been happening in North Carolina, and especially the Sandhills. Both the county’s elected leaders and the citizens of Moore County are aware of that. Many citizens who have lived here for years cringe at the sight of bulldozers along the roads and who patches of trees being chopped down. On the other hand, everybody is aware that the county needs plenty of business, loves its tourists and has a traffic problem that it must alleviate. They see the paving of more roads as a necessary evil.
In some other local battles, a dealership in Raleigh has been suing the Town of Southern Pines to build a dealership around Midland Road, and citizens of Pinehurst are protesting a roundabout around the Carolina Hotel and the Pinehurst Country Club; Gregg Davis, a local engineer with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, said about 92 trees would be uprooted in the construction of this roundabout.
We need more Beatrix Potters in this county. Every time somebody wants to buy a huge tract of land for a subdivision or a shopping mall with big-box stores all over the place, some deep-pocketed conservationist buys out that same land, and turns it into a nature preserve. When somebody has to sell a farm or a country homestead, some philanthropist will buy it and fend off any development.
Like Superman with a checkbook.
In their first meeting of this month, county commissioners voted to put the western connector back on the state roads plan, with the proposal to use as many existing roads as possible for the route. This connector route has been proposed to run from N.C. 211 near West End to N.C. 5, north of Aberdeen. Jimmy Melton made the proposal they agreed upon, by a slim 3-2 vote: in addition to the existing roads, to build two or three miles of new road south of N.C. 211, near Pine Valley Lane.
Commissioners remained divided on this issue, whether to use existing roads only or pave two to three more miles as Melton proposed. Tim Lea proposed using existing roads only, but commissioners voted against it, 3-2; Lea and Cindy Morgan, who with husband Richard live around Eagle Springs, voted in favor of it. Melton, chairman Colin McKenzie and Larry Caddell voted against this first proposal; the same board members voted for Melton’s proposal, which followed. Lea and Morgan voted against Melton’s proposal.
“Let’s look at current roads without cutting through virgin territory,” Lea said.
I wish everybody would leave that part of the state alone – around Foxfire Village and other areas. There is some wonderful countryside out there. I remember going for a nice long run up and down the road between Foxfire and Hoffman, and I was amazed to see this much wilderness.
Melton lives close to the proposed area, on Roseland Road. He apparently saw his proposal as the lesser of two evils.
“This is the least destructive route that makes use of existing roads,” he said. “If we don’t do it this way, the DOT is going to come through with a four-lane highway.”
He added that this road wouldn’t be constructed for about 15 years or so.
“It’s going to happen in everybody’s back yard. We don’t want it in our back yard, but it’s coming whether we like it or not.”
Commissioners set a public hearing for April 16 on whether to adopt a moratorium on the development of major subdivisions in a 64-square-mile area northwest of Pinehurst, called Area A.
Lea said it would be better to have a countywide moratorium on building than in just one area of the county. “I don’t like moratoriums,” he said, “but I think if we impose one on one area of the county, we should do it for all of the county.”
I couldn’t agree with him more.
Several of the citizens said some alarming things at the public meeting on the 2009-15 State Transportation Improvement Program, which included the western connector. Before the commissioners voted for the feasibility study to use existing roads except for a few new roads, person said constructing the route would destroy creeks, streams and springs, pass through old-growth pine forests that include the longleaf pine, and destroy valuable wetlands. He said the county has a critical water shortage as it is, and the water comes from the area south of Samarkand and flows into Lake Diamond. He said. It would violate the U.S. Water Act of the 1970s.
Two members of a family that have lived in the Foxfire area since Colonial times spoke up. “It’s pretty pristine out there,” said Sharon McDonald, who lives on Foxfire Road. “It’s the last undeveloped area in that section of the county,” said Amy McDonald.
I have lived in the Sandhills for more than half my life, and having spent plenty of time in other places, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world. Some people here are concerned about Southern Pines, Pinehurst and Aberdeen going the way of Chapel Hill and Cary, once quaint little Southern towns that turned into sprawling metropolitan areas.
All these places are really nice and picturesque, and that could be their undoing: They’re all so pretty that everybody wants to live there. A lot of people are trying, and I don’t blame them, after living in crowded cities full of crime, dope, freezing winters and shopping malls all over the place.
We’d hate to have uniformed guards turning people away at our county borders, but I wish there were some way we could discourage people from moving here. Swelling populations need more places to live, more water, more food sources, more spaces in the schools for their children, more health professionals, more places where they can all work and more police officers to control the proportionate rise in crime.
And it takes land.
In time, we could have so many people living here that the area turns into one of the very places many people wanted to get away from. Who knows if there’ll be any more quaint little rural villages where they can go?
I wish we could tell everybody who explores our still-beautiful county, “Please be our guests, enjoy your visit and spend your money, but go back where you came from. Go to the government meetings in your area and try to improve your own back yard – and thus save your children the stress of leaving their old friends as well. Clean up the crime and join conservation committees.”
Maybe the people who take this advice will make their hometowns look nice enough to be tourist attractions.
We miss you, Miss Potter!

Labels: Newspaper columns

posted by Bill Lindau @ 9:10 AM