Kiesa Kay
MNJ Correspondent
For thousands of years, the soil and rocks of Western North Carolina have been mined for minerals. Rivers foamed white with runoff and silicosis, white lung choked miners. In the 1970s, environmental measures arrived to stop destruction, and other laws came, too, to keep Native American cultural sites and artifacts on public lands safe from harm.
Ignoring these laws to expedite development and projects has caused irreparable harm, said Scott Ashcraft, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 32 years. Ashcraft has filed suit hoping to halt the harm.
“When you dig up our history, you can’t get it back,” Ashcraft said. “It’s gone forever.”
Almost half a century ago, officials for the U.S. Forest Service believed that significant archaeological sites would be found solely on flatlands and not on the steep slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. That theory has been disproven, Ashcraft says, but the practices have not changed, and that failure to protect cultural heritage and adhere to federal laws threatens 85 percent of publicly owned lands.
“A lot of the mining and quarrying here started right on top of where Native Americans did the same thing,” Ashcraft said.
Mitchell County, a geologically-rich location for minerals of international interest and national security, has attracted private corporations, and mining can be worth millions, even trillions, of dollars.
For example, Hurricane Helene (downgraded to a tropical storm after slowing down over land) and tariffs hit Sibelco, the biggest employer in Mitchell County, in 2025. Their earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization fell 15.9 percent, but still amounted to 233 million Euros (about $275 million), according to Agg-Net.
The Quartz Corp has an estimated revenue of $70 million a year, according to CompWorth. The global high purity quartz market is projected to grow from $1.15 billion to 2025 to $2.07 billion by 2034, according to Wall Street Watchdogs.
Spruce Pine is the only place in the world that produces the ultra-high purity quartz used in semiconductor manufacturing.
“The unique geology under Mitchell County has been meaningful for millennia,” Ashcraft said. “The geology here meant as much to people then as it does to us today.”
The federal government owns less than 8 percent of the state’s land. By using an old and disproven formula, Ashcraft said, the U.S. Forest Service has avoided investigation of 87 percent of that land for ancient artifacts, gravesites, and more culturally meaningful materials
Details of Ashcraft’s work can be found at www.scottashcraft.com.
“Cultural resources, archaeological sites and sacred areas belong to the public and to tribal ancestors,” he said. “They don’t belong to a particular government agency. Looking around Spruce Pine now, we’re looking at an intensely significant cultural landscape. We have a wild and untapped huge archaeological phenomena here, the opportunity to show the nation and the world what actual history is and was. They want to keep a cap on it.”