Alamance residents push back on proposed 1,000-home Saxapahaw development

A tense public comment session in Graham turned a county budget meeting into a fight over whether southeastern Alamance County can absorb another wave of housing. Residents packed the May 18 commissioners meeting to oppose a proposed development off Morrow Mill Road near Saxapahaw that could bring as many as 1,000 homes to rural land and reshape roads, wells, septic systems, schools and waterways.

The proposal now taking shape is actually two projects. The Morrow Mill Subdivision concept plan calls for 541 homes on 440 acres at 7941 Morrow Mill Road, while Hunter’s Ridge is sketched for 415 homes on about 371 acres on Austin Quarter Road. Together, the projects would total 956 homes in an area that neighbors described as still rural, even as growth pressure spreads beyond the Mebane corridor and Burlington city limits.

Haw River Assembly has raised the sharpest land-use concerns, saying the developments would rely on private wells or private community wells and could draw an estimated 382,400 gallons a day from the local aquifer. The group also says the parcels sit near Cane Creek and the Haw River, and that Alamance County lacks an enforceable rural stormwater ordinance with riparian buffers, retention ponds or impervious-surface caps.

Residents pressed the same point from a different angle. Ebony Pinnix said people had spent months trying to stop the proposal and described repeated efforts to gather neighbors on weeknights whenever the issue surfaced. Other speakers argued that the land should stay in its current rural use rather than be converted into a dense residential subdivision, and they warned that the financial upside could go to outside investors while local families absorb the traffic, water and school impacts.

Commissioner Pamela Thompson acknowledged the strain the project could place on schools and said the county may need another elementary school, middle school and high school if growth of this scale continues in an already crowded area. That warning landed in the middle of a district-wide effort by Alamance-Burlington School System leaders to redraw attendance lines for the 2026-2027 school year, a process affecting roughly 1,440 students across 11 elementary schools and three middle schools.

The fight is unfolding in a county without traditional zoning in its unincorporated areas, leaving land development oversight to the Alamance County Planning Department. Planning Director Matthew Hoagland laid out a draft countywide land-use map and rural preservation ordinance in August 2025 that would have created agricultural, rural residential and mill-village districts, including proposed 5-acre minimums in agricultural areas and 2-acre minimums in rural residential areas. The next stop for the Saxapahaw-area proposal is expected to be the Alamance County Planning Board, where the debate over how much growth rural Alamance can carry is set to continue.