POWER SHOVEL CLEARING LAND IN PREPARATION FOR BURNING, LITTLE CREEK

As a road builder I hate to cut the land up. I realize the necessity of it, and that you have to state the priorities. But I’d hate to see a big farm, a family farm - where a fellow inherited one hundred acres from his dad, and then he decides to sell that land, and then it’s cut up into one-acre tracts. I hate to see that, but it’s a part of change. People in this free nation we live in have the right to do things like that, but I hope that I don’t live long enough to see Madison County change drastically. We have a small population of people in a big land area, and there’s a lot of national forest area, and there’s a lot of natural beauty to the area. I know that most of the people, either native or the people that have moved in, non-native people, want to maintain Madison. They don’t want to make a Buncombe County (Asheville) out of it, or a Wake County (Raleigh.) They want it to remain a rural isolated county, but at the same time they want industry. They want growth. They want convenience. So, all of that is in a mix right now, and I don’t know how it’s going to shake out.

Stan Hyatt, NCDOT Resident Engineer