WAKE COUNTY, N.C. -- After it passes under Interstate 40, Crabtree Creek forms a boundary between William B. Umstead State Park and Wake Stone Corp.’s Triangle Quarry.

On one side, people hike under a canopy of trees on the Company Mill and Inspiration trails, getting exercise and seeking refuge from the traffic and noise that surround the park.

Across the creek, up a hill and behind a concrete barrier, workers have been blasting and crushing rock for 42 years. The trucks that haul it away to construction sites share the road that people use to enter Umstead from Cary.

Whether the quarry and the park have been good neighbors is at the heart of the conflict over whether Wake Stone should be allowed to create a second quarry on property owned by Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The fight over the proposed quarry continues to drag on eight years after it appeared in a draft of the airport master plan.

Sam Bratton, Wake Stone’s president and CEO, thinks the existing Triangle Quarry has been more than compatible with the park. Bratton cites a letter that Jean Spooner, the head of a coalition of groups that aims to protect the park, wrote in 1999.

Wake Stone Corp. was seeking approval for a new quarry in Chatham County and wanted some character references. It asked Spooner, head of The Umstead Coalition, to write about the company and its quarry.

“In the 10 years that I have been a member of The Umstead Coalition, I have never heard a complaint about Wake Stone’s operation next to Umstead,” she wrote. “Our experience with Wake Stone Corporation has been positive.”

Spooner says much has changed in 25 years. That letter doesn’t reflect her feelings or that of The Umstead Coalition for a host of reasons, she says, not least the company’s desire to build a second quarry on the park boundary.

Spooner and Bratton haven’t spoken to each other in years. Instead, amid the acrimony over the company’s plans to expand its operation next to Umstead onto the RDU land, the two sides communicate indirectly through lawsuits, press releases and yard signs.

Spooner, a retired extension professor from North Carolina State University, speaks for people who love the park and its nearly 5,600 acres of wilderness in the middle of a metro area of more than 2 million people. Many oppose sacrificing 105 acres of forested land next to the park for an open pit mine.

“A heavy industrial site does not generally make a great neighbor to a park,” Spooner said during a walk in the woods near the RDU property. “And this one is no exception.”

Bratton, who heads the company his father, John, started 74 years ago, takes a more pragmatic view on the proposed quarry. Rock needed to build roads, parking lots, houses, restaurants and other buildings in the Triangle has to come from somewhere, he says, and a central location off I-40 near Cary means shorter truck trips to where it’s needed.

Besides, Bratton says, the Triangle Quarry has been a good neighbor to Umstead since the 1980s.

“We’re not going to damage the park, and we’re not hurting anybody,” Bratton said, standing on the edge of the pit across Crabtree Creek from the RDU property. “We’re going to exist over there like we’ve existed over here, and most people don’t even know we’re here.”

It’s been five years since the RDU Airport Authority approved a mining lease with Wake Stone. The airport had acquired the patch of forest known as the Odd Fellows property in the 1970s for a proposed runway that was never built. RDU officials estimated that allowing Wake Stone to mine the property would generate more than $20 million, mostly through royalties from the sale of stone over 25 to 35 years.

Since then, the company and quarry opponents have spent well over $1 million on lawsuits. The Umstead Coalition failed to persuade the courts that the airport’s mineral lease with the company was illegal or to stop the state from modifying the mining permit to allow Wake Stone to expand.

But the group is still fighting a change in that permit that extended the life of the Triangle Quarry and makes the RDU project possible. Meanwhile, a permit Wake Stone needs to build a bridge over Crabtree Creek to connect the two quarry sites remains contested four years after state regulators first issued it.

Neither side is backing down.

Spooner says the Umstead Coalition has been through struggles like this before. She cites the successful effort to stop a proposed four-lane highway called the Duraleigh Connector along the eastern end of the park in the mid-1990s. Spooner became chair of the coalition during that battle and was credited with inspiring and holding together those who opposed the highway.

That effort took 15 years, she says. The fight over the RDU quarry is entering its ninth year.

“Should it have taken this long? No,” Spooner said. “Does it? Apparently yes.”

A 48-year relationship with the park

Jean Spooner’s first night in North Carolina was spent in a tent in Umstead State Park in 1976. She had just graduated from Cornell University with a degree in agronomy and drove to Raleigh for her graduate school interviews at N.C. State. She saw Umstead on a map and figured the campground would be a good option for someone on a student’s budget.

Spooner went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in soil science from NCSU, with another master’s in statistics from Utah State in between. She went to Utah with her husband, an Air Force pilot, and decided to return to the Triangle and N.C. State after he died in 1983.

It was then that she really began to spend more time in Umstead. She loves the tree-covered hills and valleys, especially those spots where the traffic noise falls away and you can hear only birds, wind through the trees or the murmur of a creek.

“You can get away from the whole hectic world,” she says. “It’s basically a sanctuary.”

The unofficial trail along the Odd Fellows property line leads to such a spot, where Crabtree Creek passes through a narrow valley thick with trees. Spooner followed it one morning this winter, careful to stay on the right side of the “No trespassing” signs that Wake Stone has tacked to trees all along the boundary.

“You can see these hills,” she said, pointing toward the Odd Fellows forest. “Well they’ll all be gone and you’ll be able to see right to I-40 and the Cary sewage treatment plant.”

Spooner, 69, has been chair of the Umstead Coalition since the 1990s. Besides trying to save the park from what it sees as threats, the coalition supports it with money and labor on projects such as planting trees and gardens, maintaining trails, restoring some of the park’s historic buildings and putting solar panels on the roof of the visitors center.

Spooner, who retains the accent of her native Rochester, New York, knows Wake Stone’s mining proposal in detail. As she picks her way along the trail, she points to the spot near a creek where the company’s proposed sound wall will end and a chain-link fence will begin. She says the company’s studies have cited different numbers for how many trucks will be hauling stone from the site across the creek.

“But in all of them they acknowledge it’s close to 400 trucks going by here a day,” she says.

Spooner acknowledges that Wake County needs the kind of rock that Wake Stone proposes to mine. But she notes that are seven other quarries in Wake County.

“So I don’t disagree that the market needs the quarries,” she said. “What I disagree with is that it needs this quarry.”

‘A good location’ for a rock quarry

Sam Bratton was 6 years old, the youngest of seven children, when his father acquired land near Knightdale and began mining stone in 1970. Wake Stone remains a family business; Sam’s two older brothers, John and Ted, each took a turn running the company, and he has been president since 2009, adding CEO to his title in 2020.

Bratton, 59, remembers helping to survey the land that would become the Triangle Quarry in the early 1980s. He was studying industrial relations at UNC-Chapel Hill, and remembers the site was pretty remote, with a couple of houses and a fishing shack on a pond.

But Bratton says his father knew that I-40 and the North Harrison Avenue interchange were about to open, connecting the fast-growing state capital with Research Triangle Park.

“I guess he had some vision and could see this was going to be a good location to provide the building materials for all the growth that was coming,” he said.

At 222 acres, the Triangle Quarry site is the smallest of Wake Stone’s five quarries, including the company’s 600-acre flagship in Knightdale.

Still, the size and depth of the hole in the ground between I-40 and the park is startling the first time you approach the rim. The pit covers 90 acres, and the floor where workers blast and scoop up big chunks of gray granite gneiss is now 500 feet from the top.

The pit on the smaller Odd Fellows property would be a little more than half as big and not quite as deep. Creating a 55-acre quarry from scratch normally wouldn’t make financial sense, Bratton says.

But Wake Stone plans to use the crushing and processing equipment that’s already in place at the Triangle Quarry, by building a bridge over the creek that separates the two properties. So far, that bridge has been a sticking point, after an administrative law judge blocked an environmental permit the company needs to build it.

Bratton says the company expects to prevail on that issue. It also hopes to win over the public to the idea that it would be better for the environment overall to continue processing rock at the Triangle Quarry than to find it somewhere farther away and truck it in.

Bratton doesn’t spend nearly as much time in Umstead as Spooner but says he has hiked there, particularly along the Company Mill Trail that’s just across the creek from his quarry. In the winter, with the leaves off the trees, he can look down on Crabtree Creek, the dividing line with the park, from the access road around the pit.

Umstead is an “urban park,” he says, subject to noise from highways and the airport.

“It is not Yellowstone,” he said. “But it’s a great amenity for the community. And it’s something that certainly needs to be protected. But it doesn’t need to be protected from us.”

A ‘wonderful relationship’ that has soured

Bratton and Spooner disagree not only about the idea of a quarry next to Umstead but also on countless details.

Bratton notes, for example, that a company study of how noise would affect the park determined the quarry wouldn’t be heard above what already comes from I-40 and RDU. Spooner counters that the study didn’t account for the loss of trees and hills on the Odd Fellows property that would increase the sound of traffic from the highway.

Bratton says Wake Stone had a “wonderful relationship” with Spooner and the Umstead Coalition up until the company announced that it wanted to expand.

“It’s just bothersome,” he said. “There weren’t any blasting complaints. There weren’t any complaints about anything until we announced that.”

Spooner says that relationship has been strained at best, even at the time she wrote that letter in 1999.

She says the Umstead Coalition strongly opposed the Triangle Quarry before it was allowed to open in the early 1980s and had assumed a 50-year sunset clause in the company’s mining permit would force it to close in 2031.

But the company got that clause removed from the permit in 2018, allowing it to continue mining as long as there’s rock to process. The coalition has contested that decision by state regulators, and the N.C. Office of Administrative Hearings is scheduled to hear arguments in June.

Meanwhile, Bratton says Wake Stone won’t begin cutting trees and moving dirt on the Odd Fellows property until it can build the bridge across Crabtree Creek. On Monday, an administrative law judge affirmed the state’s decision to issue a permit for the 60-foot-wide bridge, but the Umstead Coalition will appeal to Wake County Superior Court, Spooner says.

Bratton said the company will do what’s necessary to comply with state regulations.

“We believe we’ve done everything we’ve needed to do to mitigate concerns, to minimize impacts and to make sure that we’ve been sensitive to the concerns of the state and the public and the park,” he said. “We feel good about our record; we feel good about our ability to be in regulatory compliance. And we’re amazed that this is as big an issue as it is.”

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