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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Nancy Holt, October 27, 1985. Interview K-0010. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

UNC and OWASA maintained a powerful hold over public utility matters

Holt again returns to the notion that Cane Creek residents were dismissed by more powerful political forces such as UNC and OWASA. Although UNC had relinquished control over public utilities, Holt argues that the university continued to play an active role in local utility matters.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Nancy Holt, October 27, 1985. Interview K-0010. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

FRANCES E. WEBB:
Someone suggested, I think it was a student in the class, that it was a, it was a political thing on the part of the University.
NANCY HOLT:
Yeah, it was. You see the University had been told to get out of the utilities business. But they never got out of it. They never stopped being a powerful force. And whatever the University wanted, they got. And don't ever forget that for a minute because they are the political force to be reckoned with and they as a col… - in my mind, a collective group of very, very powerful political figures. And whatever they want they jolly well get. And so they have a temporary lake out here, the beginnings of a temporary lake. Probably one of the things that irritated me the most, was people selling real estate out here as lake front property. Seven years ago. It was ads in the Chapel Hill papers, about beautiful lake front property in the Cane Creek region. And I thought, there's no lake there, how dare you? But we're - we just did not have the powerful backing. I would suspect that had this community contained the Ralph Scotts, or the William Fridays, Jim Martins, or the Rose family - some of the other families that are very, very strong politically, they would never have looked at this community. Never. But we had no real strong political figures out here. We were just as mediocre, middle-of-the-road, middle America as you can get. Not real, real pro-active in anything, except generally taking care of the community and the land. And I think raising fine people to populate this land. This is an excellent community in so far as the kids grow up to be, maybe they don't grow up to be presidents, but they don't grow up to be Charles Manson either. It's a community of middle America. And I firmly believe that had we had some very, very political family as residents here, OWASA would never have considered this or the University. And I, I often use OWASA and the University interchangeably because nothing really changed, when they became a separate department. Nothing really changed, except it wasn't UNC Water Department anymore.