In July, 2001, residents of Loachapoka in rural Lee County, Alabama, discovered that a local landowner had agreed to a forty-year lease of 400 acres of his property on Saugahatchee Creek (a contributing stream to the Tallapoosa River system) to Florida Rock Industries (FRI), a rock quarry and trucking corporation headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. The planned granite quarry would be located between Saugahatchee Creek and a rural two-lane highway, with plans to construct a railroad spur crossing the highway to provide rail access to the quarry in order to transport the rock to other states.

This archive contains a record of research done on the rock quarry and trucking industries (and ancillary industries), zoning and local government constraints in rural areas, environmental impacts, public safety concerns, and quality of life issues.

The public outcry against a third quarry locating in Lee County, which residents argued had already suffered permanent damage to Chewacla Creek and Spring Villa Park because of adjacent rock quarries, is also captured in the materials.

The struggle to “Stop the Quarry” by citizens of Lee County was a grassroots effort that began with the local Town Council and Lee County Commission, involved numerous public meetings and hearings, and eventually led to the Statehouse in Montgomery and the involvement of then-governor Don Siegelman, who sealed the records of the archaeological study of the quarry site conducted by the University of Alabama for reasons unknown.

“Don’t Take Loachapoka for Granite” became the battle cry for resident citizens against an out-of-state corporation that sought to remove the resources of the state of Alabama in exchange for county and state taxes amounting to cents per ton.

(Contributed by the donor, Wendy C. Seesock, April 10, 2023.) (Edited by Tommy Brown, July 24, 2023)