NC Policy Watch: “After living all over North Carolina, Terry and Joyce Long finally came home.
In 2020, they bought a tract of land in Hamptonville adjacent to property that had been in Joyce’s family for five generations. Joyce grew up in this Yadkin County town of just 6,100 people, and now she and her husband, Terry, could raise their four children here, a quiet, rural idyll of forests and farms and night skies that light up with stars.
A year ago, the Longs moved into a new house at the end of Stella Road. Their dreams included a small farm with some horses, a few goats. The Longs built a small campsite for their kids down by the creek, where they could wade, watch minnows and collect rocks.
“We were looking for a refuge so our children could have a secluded, safe place to grow up,” said the Rev. Terry Long, who earned a doctoral degree in divinity. “I’m a pastor so I know the brokenness in the world.”
Shortly after the Longs moved into their home, and unbeknownst to them, a man named Jack Mitchell was also interested in Hamptonville, not for the beauty above ground, but for the money to be made beneath it.
A little more than 1,000 feet from the Long’s property — the equivalent of two city blocks — Mitchell plans to build Three Oaks Quarry, a behemoth aggregate mine. If constructed, the mine would lie just 800 feet from West Yadkin Elementary School. “