Tucked away in a corner of northern Durham, West Point on the Eno has served as a wildlife refuge and recreational hub for decades.
During an idyllic hike through the secluded forest, your wandering eyes might spot an American redstart flying overhead, or a damselfly fluttering across your periphery, or perhaps a redback salamander slinking near the riverbank.
But would you expect to catch a person toweling off through their bathroom window?
A new large-scale housing development called Eno Village is moving forward just a stone’s throw from the entrance to West Point on the Eno, after three years of back-and-forth between developers, the city of Durham, neighbors, and the Eno River Association (ERA). The site is on 61.5 acres of land known as Black Meadow Ridge, where D.R. Horton, one of the country’s largest home-building firms, plans to build nearly 400 townhomes and apartments. Construction is permitted on the site thanks to a 1970s-era zoning designation that has remained, despite the city recognizing the ecological significance of Black Meadow Ridge and the surrounding watershed.
Environmentalists advocated to government officials for years to rezone or purchase the site and assimilate the land into the city or state park system, but no deal ever manifested, and in 2023, Durham planning staff approved the plan for Eno Village. While the plans were allowed under existing zoning, residents raised concerns that developing the site would increase runoff and flooding that already occurs in surrounding neighborhoods (notably during Tropical Storm Chantal last year) and disrupt the ecological habitat for wildlife, including some endangered species.
Although the project is moving forward, advocacy efforts were not in vain. The ERA, a land trust and conservation nonprofit, announced in March that it had reached a settlement agreement with the developers to take ownership of and preserve 27 acres of Black Meadow Ridge.
The new Eno Village site plan still proposes 382 units, but the development footprint is much tighter. Acquiring nearly half of the site, which includes the most environmentally sensitive parts of Black Meadow Ridge, is a win, said Ryan Fehrman, the ERA’s executive director, even if it’s still hard to watch hundreds of trees get clear-cut in the process.
“I feel it in the pit of my stomach, and I’m sure the neighbors feel the same way,” Fehrman said.
Not all the neighbors are satisfied with the results.
“There is no place for self-congratulation by those who care about the Eno,” said Jennifer Nygard, a lifelong environmental justice advocate whose mother, Margaret Nygard, founded the organization that became the ERA. “This is still habitat loss and critical watershed loss. So much damage is now taking place, and the degradation of the river will continue once the development is in place. This is a travesty that should have been stopped.”
Fifty years before Eno Village was conceived, developers proposed a nearly identical project in Black Meadow Ridge called Foxmoor, with 412 units of housing that were planned to complement a major thoroughfare being considered in the area by the state. Folks raised concerns that the expressway, called Eno Drive, and the Foxmoor project would encroach on the Eno River watershed and cause harm to the natural ecosystem.
The development plans were met with swift backlash from Margaret Nygard, whose steadfast commitment to preservation earned her the nickname “Mother of the Eno,” as well as famed Durham historian Jean Bradley Anderson. Nygard and a gang of tree huggers had founded the ERA’s predecessor, the Association for the Preservation of the Eno River, Inc., just six years earlier in 1966. At the time, Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring was sweeping the country, and environmental advocates in Durham were focusing their attention on protecting the Eno, a winding 40-mile river that spans three counties and is a critical water source for the region.
The association formed a partnership with the Nature Conservancy and successfully petitioned the U.S. Department of the Interior to issue the state’s first environmental impact statement, which effectively halted the development of Foxmoor.
Local officials from Durham and Orange counties, representatives from the state government, and members of the ERA and Nature Conservancy worked together to start acquiring property along the river for a state park. Gov. James Holshouser officially welcomed the Eno River State Park into the parks system in June 1973.
Three years later, the city of Durham opened West Point on the Eno to the public. Today, at 404 acres, it is only one-tenth the size of the state park but attracts thousands of visitors a year for hiking, swimming, and activities like kids’ summer camps and the annual Festival for the Eno, the hallmark outdoor music festival celebrating its 60th anniversary later this summer.
The ERA and other community leaders successfully diverted plans for the proposed Eno Drive corridor and protected land around the river. But Black Meadow Ridge remained outside park territory, and the zoning originally permitted in anticipation of Foxmoor—6.2 dwelling units per acre—remains to this day, allowing for the development of Eno Village.
“The huge endeavor to preserve the Eno was made to endure, not to unravel in effect and have but a short 60 year duration,” Jennifer Nygard wrote in a letter to former state Sen. Mike Woodard in 2022 asking once again for the state to intervene. (That same year, Jennifer Nygard helped publish a report on the value of protecting Black Meadow Ridge that relied on her mother Margaret’s copious notes and reflections about the ecological habitats and secluded refuge that the Eno River had to offer.)
The zoning designation survived over 50 years of zoning changes in Durham, 13 mayoral regimes, the merger of the city-county zoning ordinances in 1994, and the growth of the city and state parks systems near the Eno River.
“It was just a thing that people stopped paying attention to, and that’s where the game was lost,” said Chris Dreps, ERA’s director of conservation and stewardship, who has worked in conservation in Durham, including for Ellerbe Creek and the Eno River, for over 20 years. “It seemed to us things were just going quiet, and probably everyone was just hoping this went away, but of course, it didn’t.”
At the turn of the century, interest in the site rekindled. Friends of West Point Park, a Durham environmental advocacy group established by the City Council at the time of the park’s founding, urged local and state officials to pursue acquisition of Black Meadow Ridge, which they felt was the only lever available to protect the site. Longtime advocates for protecting the land say the state parks system and the Black Meadow Ridge property owner went back and forth on a potential sale but could not agree on a price. The state’s budget for land acquisition was limited, and the recession following the 2008 financial crisis tightened it further. The state eventually put the project on hold indefinitely.
“The fundamental problem is that the value of the land was so high,” said Dreps.
To improve the chances of acquiring the property, the Friends of West Point Park pushed Durham officials to consider transferring ownership of West Point on the Eno to the state parks system in tandem with the state acquiring Black Meadow Ridge to increase the amount of total acreage that the state would receive in a deal. Consolidating all the preserved land in the region under one roof would also give the Eno’s preservation more long-term viability.
“The per-acre value was affordable when they’re accepting 460 versus accepting 60 acres at the price they would have had to pay for that 60 acres,” Dreps explained.
During this time, the Durham planning department was reluctant to reduce the allowable building density on the Black Meadow Ridge property so as to not artificially depreciate the value of the land (and appear to be setting up a discount for the state) and Durham leaders were hesitant to relinquish one of the city’s crown jewels in West Point on the Eno. The ERA also made an attempt to acquire Black Meadow Ridge but could not raise the requisite funds. Without a clear deal in sight, the state eventually punted on acquiring the property, and the Friends of West Point Park, who were increasingly at odds with Durham leaders on how to proceed with preservation efforts, dissolved.
Following the state’s unsuccessful attempt to acquire Black Meadow Ridge, the city planning department attempted to use what levers it had to influence future uses of the site. In 2012, City Council members voted to change Black Meadow Ridge on the future land use map to “very low density.” But the future land use map, like the comprehensive plan, is a value statement and carries few, if any, enforcement mechanisms; the zoning on the site still did not change. (Durham Planning Director Sara Young told the INDY she did not “have any knowledge or information” as to why the property had not been rezoned since the Foxmoor plan fell apart.)
The Eno River wasn’t the only ecologically sensitive land that Durham and the state had their eyes on. In the early 2000s, the Hollow Rock Master Plan Committee, chaired by concerned neighbor and future county commissioner Wendy Jacobs, mapped out a strategy to acquire property along the New Hope Creek for a public park.
The Triangle Land Conservancy contributed land it owned and purchased additional parcels with grant funding from the state. Neighbors sold their land to the Triangle Land Conservancy for significantly less than market value and raised private funds to help purchase another tract owned by Duke University. The 82-acre Hollow Rock Nature Park opened to the public in 2016.
But action on Black Meadow Ridge continued to stall out for years. Another concrete plan for the property didn’t materialize until 2021, when Point Ridge LLC began exploring a large-scale development on the site. Neighbors opposed to the project said the site should be prohibited from using a decades-old rezoning change that was established for a different proposal, and that the new Eno Village project should be subject to public hearings and City Council approval.
A team of homeowners in the neighborhoods surrounding Black Meadow Ridge hired an attorney, who filed an appeal to the Board of Adjustment asking its members to “invalidate and reverse in its entirety” a 2016 letter reaffirming the 1972 zoning of the site written by former planning director Steven Medlin to Keith Brown, who owns the Eno Village property and the company developing it (Brown didn’t respond to inquiries from the INDY for this story).
But Medlin’s assessment was upheld by Durham’s current planning director, Young, according to a 2022 letter. In the letter, Young said that the zoning established in 1972 was directly carried over from the county to the city when the jurisdictions’ zoning ordinances were merged and the land was transferred to the city.
“Given that the only stated change in the translation of zoning was the change in jurisdiction, the property’s development plan was not eliminated through the annexation action,” Young wrote.
Even though the Board of Adjustment appeal was still pending, the planning department approved the Eno Village site plan in December 2023.
Nature parks are appealing because of the isolation from modern society and its trappings. There are no delivery trucks beeping as they back up with plumes of exhaust bursting into the air; no cars with excessively loud stereo systems and those obnoxious mufflers that sound like gunfire; and no hordes of hooligans hootin’ and hollerin’ on their phones, because good luck trying to get a cell signal.
That serenity could be in jeopardy for folks who look to parts of the West Point on the Eno for respite, and few have experienced all that the park has to offer quite like Dave Owen, better known as “River Dave.”
Owen met Jennifer Nygard as a high school student at Durham High School (now Durham School of the Arts). She and her friends were how Owen came to understand the Eno preservation cause.
Twenty-four years ago, Owen and his wife built a cabin on half an acre of land near West Point after looking at properties for over a decade. He often walks from his backyard to the park, where he sees an increasing number of deer migrating along the riverbank, hears the occasional coyote howl (a more recent phenomenon) or drops his paddleboat into the water.
“There’s an intimacy I’m able to have that obviously most people can’t have for this particular river because they don’t know how to paddle inflatable kayaks 300 miles and they are not able to find property,” Owen said. “I consider myself lucky and privileged.”
He was an outspoken member of the Friends of West Point Park and one of many voices calling out the importance of preserving Black Meadow Ridge. Owen remains concerned about the impact of the new development on the park.
“There’s not going to be another place quite like West Point,” Owen said. “It’s kind of the anchor of the whole system. That’s why Black Meadow Ridge is important. Nobody really knows the impact of all those people living up there. They’re going to be in the park day and night, and I can’t blame them for wanting to be up there, because I live on the other side. I can’t deny that to people, if they can do it respectfully.”
Preparations have already begun on the site. Where a forest once stood is now an open expanse devoid of trees and wildlife. Soon, hundreds of residents will occupy Black Meadow Ridge.
In addition to gaining ownership of half the Black Meadow Ridge site, the ERA was able to negotiate additional proffers as part of the settlement agreement.
The latest plans for Eno Village show 240 multifamily apartments and 142 townhomes on roughly 28.5 acres. At least 3% of the units will be affordable to folks at 80% area median income for a minimum of 30 years. The ERA also negotiated a limit on impervious surfaces, one of the primary contributors to runoff and river flooding. Impervious surfaces can’t exceed 16 of the site’s total 34 acres.
Point Ridge has committed to building fencing and historic identification for the Holman Cemetery, an abandoned gravesite connected to the family of formerly enslaved Durham resident Dilsey Holman and her descendants that sits on the edge of the site.
Point Ridge is also donating $20,000 to the ERA “as an endowment for the stewardship and maintenance of the Preservation Tract as undeveloped open space,” according to the settlement agreement.
Eventually, the ERA will likely convey the land to the city of Durham to include as part of West Point on the Eno.
Eno Village is a microcosm of the competing challenges Durham leadership faces. Housing stock still lags behind population growth, increasing the urgency for a larger and more diverse housing portfolio, but that growth can sometimes butt up against Durham’s natural environment. Residents have routinely spoken out at public meetings, urging the City Council to take a stronger stance against what they say are sprawling developments in environmentally sensitive areas, bringing with them vials of “tomato soup,” reddish-brown water filled with sediment runoff from water sources near active
construction sites.
“In a basic way, housing is a supply-and-demand thing,” said Fehrman, who previously served as executive director at the Genesis Home, Families Moving Forward, and the North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness and has a deep understanding of Durham’s housing shortage. “We shouldn’t be building in environmentally sensitive spaces. We shouldn’t be building in floodplains. But people need a place to live, and I don’t think it’s viable for me in this role to oppose any and all development.”
The planning department has worked to prevent sprawling development and encourage density in the urban core through new regulations within the forthcoming rewrite of its land use code. Young told the INDY that city staff, as part of the process of updating the city’s Comprehensive Plan in 2023, “did look at areas that should be preserved due to environmental concerns,” but she noted that after a 2024 change to state law, the city can’t downzone properties without owner consent, “which limits how proactive a local government can be in this regard.”
“Black Meadow Ridge is a big land and it got a lot of attention,” Dreps said. “But there are a lot of smaller, or even not so small, places like that around some of our other parks. And we can avoid this kind of outcome if we invest a little bit more in our parks.”
Many of the neighbors, like Dreps, Jennifer Nygard, and Owen, are conflicted about the state of Black Meadow Ridge. Most agree that acquiring a large chunk of the site for preservation beats the alternative but remain frustrated that more wasn’t done to preserve the land in the five decades that have passed since the initial rezoning that eventually allowed Eno Village and since advocates spared Black Meadow Ridge from the Foxmoor development.
In 2022, Jennifer Nygard told the INDY that her mother predicted that the fight to ensure ongoing protection of the areas around the Eno River would be “never ending.”
“The quality of life of a community can slip away very subtly, little by little, day by day, the deterioration hardly noticed,” Margaret Nygard wrote to the Durham Chamber of Commerce in 1989 as part of her crusade to protect the Eno. “Our task today as Durham grows and prospers is to make sure that these lands are not despoiled and that this area continues to remain ‘The Flower of Carolina.’ The protection of our three main rivers and their surrounding lands is a form of fiscal responsibility.”
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