WALNUT COVE, North Carolina — People in this rural, tight-knit town have a long history of beating back timber mills, gas drillers and coal ash dumps.
Their next Goliath: one of the largest planned data centers in the state.
A political firestorm over a Charlotte-based company’s attempt to build a massive data center on 1,845 acres of forest and farmland has turned Walnut Cove residents against the Board of Commissioners in ruby-red Stokes County, prompting a lawsuit and primary challenges. It has also become a test of the tech industry’s ability to win support in rural areas with promises of desperately needed tax revenue.
“I’m not anti-business, and I’m not anti-progress, but what we’re talking about here today is beyond the pale,” resident Elijah Evans told commissioners during a meeting in January where the board initially green-lighted the project. “I wonder how much money it would take for you to sell the soul of this county and deafen your ears to the will of the people that elected you.”
The fight is playing out over land that many residents consider the physical legacy of the community’s past. The area, which sits along the Dan River, once hosted villages of the Saura Native American tribe, slave plantations and a historic migration route that funneled settlers into the Carolina backcountry.
Now it could become Project Delta, a multibuilding campus housing thousands of data servers. Residents fear the development would pollute the community, keep neighbors up at night, drain water supplies and drive up energy prices. But some local politicians see it as a lifeline for a financially distressed county where the median annual income hovers around $46,000.
Before voting to approve the project at the January meeting, Commissioner Sonya Cox sometimes defended her position through tears, telling residents that she doesn’t want the county to “die on the vine.”
“I want it to prosper,” she said. “Do I want a data center? Not so much. But I do want the things the revenue can bring to our county.”
The approval was short-lived. In the face of public backlash and a lawsuit, the Stokes County Board of Commissioners — made up of five Republican members — backpedaled its decision in April, restarting the permitting process and resetting the land battle.
The panel could take up the issue again as soon as July 13.
Bipartisan pushback
Data center developers have sought out rural counties like Stokes for access to larger, cheaper plots of land, fewer zoning conflicts and local governments that would benefit from a larger tax base.
But tech companies are running into increasing public resistance. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, at least 75 projects in the U.S. worth $130 billion were disrupted by local opposition, according to tracking company Data Center Watch, a research project run by the AI firm 10a Labs.
Counties across the country are enacting moratoriums for the massive power-hungry facilities to buy time to study potential impacts, while state legislatures are weighing stricter oversight and disclosure requirements for water and power use.
In North Carolina, at least 29 counties or municipalities — out of 100 counties — have passed data center moratoriums, according to data collected by the state’s Department of Commerce. North Carolina lawmakers are considering a GOP-sponsored bill that would slap stricter regulations on the facilities, and Democratic Gov. Josh Stein wants to phase out all data center tax exemptions by 2032.
Project Delta is opposed by a diverse set of residents, including environmental advocates, property owners, Native American groups and the descendants of the area’s enslaved people and plantation owners. Even the Stokes County planning board urged county commissioners to reject the project’s zoning request.
The opposition is “fully bipartisan in Stokes County,” said Anne Harvey David, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is helping residents challenge the development. “There is no political slant to this, other than this is their homes and livelihoods, and they do not want this data center.”
That is notable for one of the reddest counties in the state. President Donald Trump carried Stokes County by nearly 60 percentage points in the 2024 election, winning all 18 precincts. The county’s congressional representative, Virginia Foxx, is one of the House’s more conservative members, frequently advocating for lower taxes, reduced federal spending and deregulation.
Still, the project’s proponents — including the majority of county commissioners — cite the promise of economy-transforming tax revenue.
The developer, Engineered Land Solutions, says the data center will create 250 to 500 jobs and funnel as much as $40 million into the county’s annual tax base.
That’s roughly equal to all existing property taxes combined, according to company spokesperson Pat Ryan. CEO Drew Nations has said he is committed to forgoing development on 850 acres to avoid known archaeological areas, while including landscaped buffers, a closed-loop cooling system to conserve water and other environmental protections.
“We want to build a better future and a better future that’s done responsibly,” Nations told county commissioners during the January meeting. “This is not just a vote for one project, this supports an ecosystem of businesses in Stokes County. There’s a ripple effect.”
Data centers can bring immense tax revenue. The roughly 200 data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, are projected to generate an estimated $1.3 billion in tax revenue this year.
But Project Delta hasn’t announced a customer for its massive processing power, prompting residents to raise concerns that the facility could become a stranded asset.
Residents say the data center is the latest example of their community being treated as a “sacrifice zone” — or, as local dentist Tim Mabe put it, “an outhouse for the rest of the county.”
In the 1990s, the community successfully beat back the rapid expansion of industrial timber mills. More than two decades later, residents formed the group No Fracking in Stokes and worked with the local NAACP to secure a countywide ban on hydraulic fracking.
“They’ve always treated southeastern Stokes County like this, like it’s just a throw away,” said Caroline Armijo, an artist who grew up in the area and still works there.
Boos and tears
In January, after weeks of public opposition and a petition that garnered more than 2,600 signatures (it’s now up to 3,900), three out of five county commissioners voted to rezone four parcels of land, allowing data center development in a formerly agricultural and residential area.
The mood leading up to the vote was tense. Scores of people gathered outside the room loudly booing the proceedings, which lasted nearly three hours.
The public comment period was dominated by people opposed to the data center. Residents worried about the impacts on noise, property values, utility bills and archaeological sites. Local historians and Native American officials described the land as culturally and spiritually significant, expressing concern about harming potential burial sites. And residents repeatedly accused commissioners of putting profit over people.
But county commissioners grappled with the economic consequences of blocking the project and forgoing a potentially huge leap in tax revenue.
“We’ve been working for 20 years to try to find a revenue stream like this,” Commissioner Rick Morris said at the January hearing. “I don’t see how you pass up an opportunity like this.”
Morris, Cox and Commissioner Keith Wood voted in favor of the rezoning, while Chair Wayne Barneycastle and Commissioner Brad Chandler opposed it.
The fallout was swift. In March’s Republican primary, two incumbent commissioners were defeated: Chandler and Morris, who finished last in an eight-candidate race. Some residents attributed his wounding defeat to his “yes” vote on the data center.
Little more than a week later, data center opponents filed a lawsuit, arguing that the commissioners had not met the requisite public notice requirements.
That prompted the commission to void its January rezoning approval and start the permitting process all over again. In a statement posted on the board’s website, commissioners said the lawsuit influenced their decision.
“It correctly pointed out flaws that we needed to address,” the commissioners wrote. “And there was no way to fix that after the fact except by voiding the rezoning entirely and starting over.”
But the board took issue with the notion that the data center influenced primary results, noting that Chandler, a Republican incumbent who lost his seat, had voted against the rezoning approval.
“Speaking only to what we can see from the election outcomes, there is no clear link between how commissioners voted on this issue and the results at the ballot box,” they wrote.
Harvey David, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice lawyer who helped file the lawsuit, said a major sticking point for residents has been a lack of transparency in the process.
“There wasn’t a lot of information in the application,” she said. “And I don’t know where these figures are supposed to be coming from, this $20 [million] to $40 million figure — it’s outlandish.”
When asked how the company calculated the estimated tax revenue, Ryan, the ELS spokesperson, said the project will generate $20 million when it’s 50 percent complete and $40 million at 100 percent completion. Spokesperson Lucille Sherman later noted the estimate is based on the tax revenue generated by existing data centers in North Carolina, applied proportionately to Project Delta.
The company plans to resubmit the zoning request and does not have a backup location in mind, Ryan said. County commissioners declined to comment on whether they would again approve the zoning change.
“We are currently under an active lawsuit from groups opposing the data center, and on the advice of our legal counsel I’m not making any public comments related to the data center,” Morris, the commissioner, said in an email.
Buried past
Walnut Cove first made headlines in 1972, when a teenage boy stumbled upon the 17th-century remains of a woman adorned with jewelry and other ornaments near the Dan River.
She belonged to the matrilineal Saura Tribe, whose members were among the first inhabitants of the region. Archaeologists eventually discovered more than 100 Native American burials in what is known as Upper Sauratown. A bronze statue of Sauratown Woman is now displayed on the steps of North Carolina’s history museum.
The land was also key to building one of the largest slave empires in the American South. The colonial Hairston family traveled the nearby Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to the Walnut Cove area, establishing a number of plantations that enslaved thousands of people.
On a recent afternoon outside his home in Baileytown — which abuts the data center property — Chad Bailey stood with his cousin David Rose and recalled a childhood spent roaming the remnants of that history.
“To me, you could tell there were 3-foot-tall sandstone markers for the Native Americans, and then most of the slaves [graves] is about a foot or shorter,” Bailey said. “My grandma always said our people is here.”
Bailey is among the many residents in Stokes County who trace their lineage to Peter Hairston, a state senator and Confederate soldier who built the Sauratown Hill plantation in 1786. That includes the descendants of Hairston and Sally Blag, a woman he enslaved.
“Peter Hairston is my fifth great-grandfather, probably same as yours,” Bailey said, gesturing to Rose.
Baileytown, he said, was named for his great-great-grandfather on the other side of his family, Armstead Bailey, who arrived in the area as a slave in 1858. The town was established as a Black farming community during Reconstruction.
The Hairston branch of Rose’s family once farmed in an adjacent area, known locally as Little Egypt. But residents were displaced in the 1970s when Duke Energy flooded the land to build a cooling lake for its Belews Creek Steam Station, a coal-fired power plant. Rose said there’s interest among scattered descendants to return.
“The data center and different things like that undermine the potential for that as a true economic opportunity for descendant communities,” he said. “People’s grandchildren want to farm and live inside of the stories that their grandparents told them.”
Bailey manages the Baileytown cemetery, where his family members have been laid to rest for over a hundred years. He worries the data center could damage the graves not in a cemetery — those of his ancestors that archaeologists have yet to identify.
“To destroy that much property, it’s not a good gain, it’s not a good trade,” Bailey said. “If it were up to me, I would let a university or several universities use it as a study area.”
Engineered Land Solutions has said that in addition to not touching identified archaeological sites, it will follow applicable law and consult with the appropriate authorities if any other culturally significant areas, artifacts or burial sites are discovered.
“We do not view that as optional,” Ryan, the company spokesperson, said in an email.
‘Punched in the face’
About 50 people gathered on a recent Saturday in the Walnut Cove public library to map out a battle plan, which includes pushing the county to consider a moratorium on data centers.
Tensions ran high when residents discussed the potential noise and environmental impacts of a supercomputing campus so close to residential property.
“If people aren’t able to sleep because of the noise, what family is going to move here if their kids can’t sleep?” one resident said. “That will kill our community. Our community will die!”
The developer has pledged to keep noise levels “in the range of normal indoor conversation or an office HVAC system.” But stories of the constant low hum of industrial-size fans have alarmed communities near proposed data centers.
The facilities also require massive amounts of electricity and water to cool their computer chips, which are prone to overheating. Engineered Land Solutions has stressed that the project will pay for its own energy upgrades and electricity costs, so residents and businesses don’t foot the bill, and that its daily water use will be comparable to an office building.
But residents are wary. The data center “will consume water, raise our electric bills, destroy our rich history,” said resident Jason Duncan during the January commission meeting.
In some ways, Walnut Cove’s pushback to development began in the 1970s, when Carolina Power & Light Co. — now Duke Energy — built its Belews Creek coal-fired power plant.
The plant — built to meet rapidly rising energy demand from population growth and industrial expansion — displaced a long-standing farming community to build the power plant’s cooling lake.
Residents see the coal plant as a cautionary tale. The utility stored coal ash in unlined pits near Belews Lake, risking the release of toxic metals into the surrounding groundwater that feeds residents’ wells. In 2019, Duke Energy settled the resulting lawsuit by agreeing to clean up 80 million tons of coal ash. Utility spokesperson Bill Norton said that job is more than halfway complete, and coal ash now goes to a lined landfill or is recycled.
But the fallout isn’t over for the community. Though Duke Energy says drinking water is protected from its coal operations, residents continue to blame the coal ash for a series of cancer diagnoses in Walnut Cove.
They worry about the unforeseen consequences of other developments, such as data centers. Danielle Bailey-Lash, a local environmental activist and elected official who died at age 45 after a protracted battle with brain cancer, repeatedly comes up in conversations about the data center. Her portrait hangs in the Walnut Cove public library.
“The area has just been punched in the face over and over and over and over,” said Ephraim Harrell, a filmmaker who grew up around Walnut Cove.
The Southern Environmental Law Center said the settlement marked the largest coal ash cleanup in the country. It’s an indication of Walnut Cove’s determination, said Megan Kimball, a senior attorney for SELC.
“I kind of feel like the data center company probably picked Walnut Cove without knowing the history. They thought they’d be able to do this easily,” she said.
“I think they underestimated the people of Walnut Cove.”
