Mac Jordan’s family members have built their livelihoods around the Haw River for generations, first as owners and operators of the Saxapahaw Cotton Mill and now as owners and property managers of the newly revitalized Saxapahaw Rivermill apartments and commercial space.
What before was a small industrial mill community has become a favorite spot for local tourism.
With miles of walking trails along the Haw River, paddle excursions, concerts, restaurants, and even its own craft brewery, Saxapahaw is bursting at the seams on weekends with visitors from Greensboro, Raleigh, and everywhere in between.
Saxapahaw resident Amanda Graham describes how surprised people are when they come to visit her, explaining that this now-booming little oasis wasn’t on their radar in the past.
“Because it stank,” Graham says.
People who have lived in the area long enough remember the days before the 1972 Clean Water Act took effect.
Reminiscing, Jordan describes the river of his childhood.
“It was a dead river. There were dyes being poured in, raw sewage. I would walk to school across the bridge [and suds] would just float up in the air,” Jordan says.
In those days, the reek of dead fish kept people away from the river, but not so today.
“It is the thing that brings people here in every sense of the word,” says Kevin Weil, who works at the Saxapahaw General Store.
The Haw River is now a vital piece of every community along its banks. The river and its tributaries span five counties and include dozens of public access points.
Holding a pair of binoculars, Dave Surratt describes what he loves most about the Haw: the birds.
“I really love to see the herons and kingfishers especially. It can make my week just seeing one or two of those guys and hearing them chatter at each other,” Surratt says.
A quiet walk along the river’s banks reveals its thriving ecosystem of fish, aquatic birds, and even otters.
“It’s a place where I go when I am in need of connection or in need of being solitary,” says Taylor Barrett, who travels from nearby Carrboro to find peace by the river.
“I’ve built a lot of relationships sitting right next to the Haw, repaired a lot of relationships. It’s facilitated connection and the building of love and reparation. That’s beautiful,” says Anna Maynard, a Saxapahaw resident.
The moon is peeking over the horizon on a perfect fall evening at the old Bynum Bridge, a community landmark for its historical significance and distinctive graffiti-soaked concrete. A group of good-natured neighbors mills about, walking their dogs and catching up with one other as the river gurgles happily below.
In Bynum, residents talk about the river as a way of life. Hiking, paddling, swimming, tubing, and fishing along the river is part of their everyday.
But years of concern about pollution are hard to ignore.
Barclay and Ian Spotz have lived next to the Haw for 18 years.
“We swim, we float, we walk by the Haw. We’ve raised our kids here, and they have been swimming in the Haw ever since they were two,” Barclay says. But when asked whether they are concerned about pollution in the river, Barclay quickly responds, “Yes, we are very concerned.”
The couple participated in a 2020 Duke University study on potentially cancerous per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and discovered that while Barclay’s PFAS levels were normal, the levels in Ian’s blood were “not OK.”
Residents in the town of Pittsboro, which sources its drinking water from the Haw River, had PFAS levels two to four times higher than the general population of the United States, the study found. But many residents along the Haw River have come to accept pollution as an unfortunate reality.
“Because we’ve spent so much time on the river, in a certain way you just accept things like PFAS or other pollution. You kind of ignore it. You’re just kind of like, ‘Well, I’m surrounded by so much pollution, at least I’m feeding my soul,’” says Ryan Smith, a Bynum resident.
Emily Sutton is the Haw riverkeeper and a well-known community leader up and down the river. She can be found several times a week testing water at dozens of points along the Haw River and its tributaries and has been fighting the many threats to the river’s health since she began working with the Haw River Assembly several years ago.
Threats to the Haw’s water quality are varied. But right now, Sutton’s biggest concern is the industrial chemicals, including PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, making their way into the Haw, especially from Burlington-based industries.
“These are relatively new chemicals,” Sutton explains. “I mean, they’ve been around since the ’70s, but we’re just now getting the chemistry to understand them, because until now they were proprietary”—meaning that the companies owned rights to the chemical composition and were not required to release that information publicly.
In the past year, there have been three episodes of 1,4-dioxane leaving the Burlington Wastewater Treatment Plant in high concentration, heading downriver toward Pittsboro’s drinking supply intake. In each case, the Town of Pittsboro is forced to suspend drawing water from the Haw River and run the town on minimum supply for days.
Bridget Perry works at Chatham Marketplace, which partners with the Town of Pittsboro to provide free reverse-osmosis-treated water to residents during these incidents. Perry describes an uptick in water customers when the town issues a water quality advisory.
But Perry feels confident that Pittsboro’s new granular activated carbon (GAC) filter, installed in late 2022, is doing its job to filter out the vast majority of PFAS and other industrial chemicals from Pittsboro’s water supply.
Pittsboro’s GAC filters cost $3 million but are more suited for filtering PFAS than 1,4 dioxane. The town recently announced plans to continue improvements to its water filtration system, altogether resulting in enormous expenses for the small town.
On February 12, the Pittsboro Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to sue Burlington-based Apollo Chemical, which has been traced as the source of the 1,4-dioxane releases into the Haw River.
While threats to water quality persist, so do unyielding community efforts to protect the river and instill its importance in younger generations.
A group of fourth graders from Pittsboro Elementary School clusters around Sutton, peering into the petri dish in her outstretched hand at a Learning Celebration event organized by the Haw River Assembly.
“This is my most favorite bug. Can you identify which one it is? How many tails does it have? How many legs does it have?” Sutton asks the students. Clutching guides in their hands, the kids consider a list of macroinvertebrates.
“It’s a stone fly!” they yell.
Stone flies are one of the most pollution-sensitive macroinvertebrates found in North Carolina’s waters—so a stone fly in the Haw River is an important marker of the decades-long progress that’s been made to heal the water and recover its thriving ecosystem.
For more information about the current issues facing the Haw River, join the Haw River Assembly for a presentation on the state of the Haw River March 11 at Durham South Regional Library.
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