This excerpt, the Introduction to Not in My Backyard: How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs, is used with the permission of the author and publisher, Yale University Press, and may not be redistributed or reproduced in any way or on any platform, per copyright law.

           "THE VERY FIRST THING I THOUGHT TO DO, and I told our board of directors instantly, we must all buy shares of stock. And they looked at me like I was crazy," Rae Ely recalled. She bought a few shares thinking "those ten shares are going to carry me far, and they did."[1]

           Rae had never seen The Solid Gold Cadillac, Hollywood's 1956 version of one woman taking on a giant corporation by purchasing a handful of shares, but twenty years after the Oscar-winning movie she turned a real-life W. R. Grace & Co. shareholders' meeting to similar advantage, although it would take decades for the strategy to pay dividends. That Grace "was a corporation headed up by a man with a name—and it was an old family name, unlike 'Mr. General Motors' or 'Mr. General Electric' " made it a "target."[2]

            By the May 1976 shareholders' meeting in Boston Rae was on CEO Peter Grace's radar. His staff warned that "Apparently, Mrs. Hiram (Rae) Ely ... has gotten to the Secretary [of the Interior]," who had written a typical "eco-freak letter ... asking us to give up our vermiculite reserves in Virginia." There was every reason to expect fireworks at the meeting, and a cluster of Grace lawyers and security staff was dispatched to meet the anticipated band of angry women.[3] 

           Instead, they got what Rae described as a solitary slim and pretty southern gentlewoman "dressed like a fairy princess. I mean really eye-catching clothes, not conservative... because I knew I'd be on TV." "Good morning, gentlemen," Rae drawled in her best Virginia lady accent. "So sorry about your lawyer." "What?" one of the men asked. As she headed for her seat Rae casually mentioned, "Well, you know he was arrested yesterday; I'm sure you'll hear about it."[4]

            The lawyer, Bill Perkins, had diligently labored to clear Grace's legal path to strip mine in the recently created Green Springs National Historic Landmark District. Perkins had been rounded up with ten other notables at a cockfight on Inglecress Farm near Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia. The incident had been entertaining enough to elicit the New York Times' headline "Uproar Over Cockfight Ruffles Virginia Gentry." The top brass at Grace were embarrassed by the arrest; learning about it from Rae Ely only made matters worse.[5]

            Rae had arrived at the shareholders' meeting early to get a "really choice spot.... in Peter Grace's line of sight." As soon as the public comment period began Rae jumped to her feet. "Well, Mrs. Ely," Peter boomed, "so nice to see you here again this year." "So nice to see you," Rae replied with her big cheery smile, turning sideways so that the photographers and hundreds of shareholders could see her.[6]

            "Mr. Grace," Rae began, "I'm just here this morning to tell all these shareholders how grateful the people of Green Springs are to you, sir, for the efforts that this fine company is making to preserve the beautiful historic Green Springs valley in Virginia from efforts that this company had been considering making to extract vermiculite." Rae knew that W. R. Grace still planned to mine in what she described as the most beautiful eighteenth-century grouping of historic buildings "nestled in the shadow of Monticello." But she also knew that relationships mattered. That morning's mission was to establish a good one with a powerful opponent.[7]

            The tactic worked when the entire auditorium burst into applause; people stood and cheered. Peter Grace beamed. As shareholders boarded buses that whisked them to a bicentennial luncheon in Lexington, some men raced up to Rae and announced: "Mr. Grace would like to know if you would be kind enough to ride with him today." "Certainly," Rae replied, "what a nice invitation." She soon glided off in his limousine.[8]

            "He's just a jolly, hard-drinking, Catholic elf— raised by nuns," Rae concluded. "This, of course, is the theme of the rest of our relationship.... You're never going to persuade anybody by angry ranting." Rae Ely's vivid demonstration of the good will that the company could garner with shareholders by paying lip service to preserving history and the environment was just one gambit of many in her long range strategy to drive the company out of the historic district that she had created.[9]

            Years later, after moving to a farm in Green Springs, I began to hear what seemed like fantastical stories about Rae Ely. She had defeated Governor Linwood Holton's effort to site a prison there in the early 1970s; she had prevailed over W. R. Grace's attempt to mine; she had created America's first national historic landmark in a rural district that encompassed thousands of acres; she had graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law without an undergraduate college degree; she had burned down her house in an attempt to murder her husband. Intrigued, I looked into these rumors, and much to my surprise, discovered that all but the last one proved to be true. I even noticed the bullet-pocked brown signs that announced the borders of that landmark district and realized for the first time that I lived inside it. Few people seemed to know much about Rae Ely's life before she arrived in Green Springs in 1967. What I learned about her early years made her political success all the more remarkable.

 Rae Hatfield was born in the Coconut Grove section of Miami on May 13, 1941. When Rae was five years old her mother was killed in a traffic accident. From that point on Rae was raised by a series of her father's girlfriends and wives—three of them soon to be ex-wives. Her father, Ray Hatfield, captained yachts for unsavory characters, including, it was rumored, Al Capone. Hatfield only had an eighth-grade education, "but there was no smarter man that ever lived," Rae recalled. "If he hadn't been a drunk, he [would have] done something with himself." He could be a mean drunk—so much so that the state of Florida removed Rae from her home in the spring of 1954. She was placed in foster care and a few years later shipped to a high school for girls in distress in Thomasville, Georgia. When Rae turned eighteen she graduated (or aged out of) the Vashti Industrial School for Girls, took a job at a local business, and soon married her boss, Hugh Duncan. She did not stay in Thomasville or married to Duncan for long. In 1962, when she learned that Colonel Hiram Ely, the husband of a recently deceased prominent Dachshund breeder, was seeking an appropriate mate for his wife's dogs, she showed up at his house in Flemington, New Jersey, with two candidates.[10]

            Hiram's 1692 gray stone manor house seemed magical. Likewise its dozens of acres, its horses, not to mention the fine Dachshunds and Colonel Ely himself. He was good-looking and accomplished; Rae was sold, despite the near-half-century age difference between them. They were married that same year, happily at first. Yet, as New York City's exurban sprawl crept closer, the Elys sought safe harbor. In 1967 they moved to Louisa County, Virginia, a rural backwater whose seat a county supervisor described as "a one-horse town. and the horse died in 1936."[11]

            Although Rae knew nothing about politics—when they moved to Virginia she didn't know if she and Hiram were Democrats or Republicans—her powerful will, capacity for learning, and knack for long-term strategy enabled her to shift from dependent to political action figure. She soon battled a series of powerful men who, in her opinion, threatened to destroy the unique rural character of her neighborhood and her rights as a fully empowered citizen. Her first antagonist was, at the time, Virginia's first Republican governor in the past century, Linwood Holton. In May 1970 he announced plans to close Richmond's decrepit state penitentiary by building a new "diagnostic center" to sort and rehabilitate convicted felons. It would be located directly across from the Elys' front yard in Green Springs. An island of wealth in otherwise impoverished Louisa County, Green Springs, with its many surviving plantations, had begun to attract northerners like Rae and Hiram fleeing exurban sprawl.

            The fight against the prison was so prolonged that the Washington Post labeled it "Holton's Vietnam." Rae next took on multinational mining conglomerate W. R. Grace & Co., which wanted to mine Green Springs' vermiculite, a rare absorbent mineral used in construction, manufacturing, potting soil, and sometimes as cat litter. The neighborhood activists eventually defeated Grace in a battle that lasted even longer than the prison fight."[12]

            Along the way, Rae Ely and her allies established the first national historic landmark to be honored explicitly for preserving the heritage of thousands of acres of rural history, joining a small group of American landmarked icons including the Alamo and Mount Vernon. The Green Springs National Historic Landmark District was created when property owners placed scenic conservation easements on thousands of acres of private land, sacrificing their right to subdivide their property or interfere with the rural environment that surrounded the houses and other structures. Creating a landmark to preserve rural history was all the more remarkable because nobody in Louisa's political establishment believed that Green Springs had any notable history. As the district's own supervisor told Time magazine, "Virginia is full of old houses like that."[13]

            The citizens' group led by Rae challenged the local branch of an old political machine, Virginia's Byrd organization. Circuit court judges ran the organization in rural counties, and in Louisa that judge was Harold Purcell. The local courthouse crowd had been coerced by Federal courts to integrate the Louisa County High School in 1970, but the all-white male group of public officials remained in firm control of other local prerogatives like land use. The majority of the county's voters vigorously supported the courthouse crowd's agenda: protecting male and racial privilege as well as property rights, prioritizing economic development, and most vocally, keeping the Federal government out of the county's business—at least business that was not profitable for political insiders or that might bring jobs.[14]

 Green Springs' middle-class white women may have leaned heavily on history to preserve the rural quality of their property, but they bridled at the Byrd organization's historically insulated style of politics. Instead, they engaged the full range of political venues directly (rather than merely at the ballot box or through their elected representatives), from mass meetings, to petitioning, to lobbying distant Federal agencies and litigating in Federal courts. By 1980, local land-use policy in Green Springs—a government prerogative kept as close to home as Jim Crow segregation had been—was shared with the "Feds" and a nonprofit organization led by Rae Ely and powered by female citizen activists.

            How did Rae Ely beat the odds and defeat the local machine, a powerful governor, and a Fortune 500 company? Some of the answers were obvious: her talent, skill, and persistence. It helped that she was white and upper middle-class. As I dug deeper into the extensive documentary evidence and began to interview locals, many of whom were afraid to talk about the courthouse crowd fifty years later, I realized that the full answer required an appreciation for the historical context in which this story unfolded. Rae was successful because the political, social, and economic landscape was shifting rapidly when she jumped into politics in 1970. Her personal story wound through some of the key changes experienced by Americans in the last third of the twentieth century. Indeed, it illuminated them. Rae conquered that shifting landscape and leveraged the new resources for citizen activists it unearthed. She was the right woman in the right place at the right time.

            Her story provides a unique perspective on American politics in the last third of the twentieth century. The most important change she turned to her advantage was the rising demand—especially among progressives—for an improved quality of life, manifested most visibly in the surging environmental movement. So too her recognition that the national government had penetrated a centuries-old local monopoly on racial matters by 1970. Why not engage the Federal government to protect the quality of life that she and her neighbors enjoyed in Green Springs?

            That such a quest was endorsed far more heartily by national elites both in the environmental protection sphere and among historical preservationists only increased the incentive to circumvent local control. The Green Springs activists harnessed legislation like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970, Federal agencies like the Department of the Interior, and the Federal judiciary to override local majorities who resented both the Feds' intervention in their business and any restrictions on their property. Although the white female activists in Green Springs had never been denied the right to vote, their voices had been silenced by the same ruling oligarchy that until recently had presided over Jim Crow segregation.

            Gaining access to national venues had never been easier given a decade-long commitment to opening national administrative agencies, regulatory review, and most importantly, Federal courts to citizen comments, concerns, and legal standing. Rae plunged into politics at a moment in American history when autonomous rights-bearing individuals increasingly displaced place-based communities, as did groups who identified by race and gender, regardless of where their members happened to live. In an age of jet travel, interstate highways, national broadcast networks, and most significantly, the demise of legally enforced Jim Crow segregation in the South, the connection between place and political jurisdiction meant far less than it had even a decade earlier. By 1975, the most visible pillars of the Jim Crow regime had been dismantled, clearing a path for citizens with far different backgrounds and agendas than civil rights activists. These newly minted activists demanded that their national constitutional rights be protected as well, even when local oligarchies like the one that governed Louisa County insisted otherwise.[15]

            Although place as political jurisdiction meant less than it had a few years carlier, many middle-class white women were introduced to politics when something both dear and near to home was threatened. Rae was only one of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of citizens who engaged directly in political action for the first time in the 1970s. Although they adapted strategies and tactics forged by the national civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, environmental, and second-wave feminist movements, these activists advanced far different agendas over the next three decades than the social movements of the sixties. Much of this activity occurred at the local, often neighborhood level. Newly engaged citizens reconciled the demise of place-based governance with the rise of neighborhood-based agendas by identifying more closely with like-minded Americans thousands of miles away than with certain neighbors just down the road.

            Governor Holton announced his plans for the diagnostic center shortly before the New York Times quoted highway and public utility officials criticizing "backyard obstructionists." The phrase slowly morphed into "not in my backyard" (NIMBY). Those advocating for new construction or changes in land use usually applied the term to somebody else's backyard—protesters who opposed a range of initiatives, from mobile home courts to the transportation of nuclear waste; from shelters for the homeless to drug treatment centers. It was just this kind of intrusion that prompted Rae Ely's initial foray into politics. What critics of NIMBYs have missed because their causes are so often neighborhood-based are the common concerns that many NIMBYs share across geographic boundaries. Those shared concerns about quality of life issues reshaped national political agendas.[16]

            Perhaps the most surprising resource seized by Green Springs' citizen activists was triggered by changing conceptions of what constituted history. It was only after a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia introduced a newly minted framework for understanding Green Springs' past that residents embraced it as the best way to authenticate the area's distinctive characteristics. Prison opponents argued that history consisted of more than famous political leaders and military battles. An approach that captured the relationship between old structures—even if nobody famous ever slept there—and the surrounding landscape encouraged Green Springs residents to dig deeper into their own past. It ultimately shaped the district's future.

            By the 1970s these tectonic shifts in the relationship between citizen and state were taking place against a backdrop of long-term economic decline in the United States. Yet policymakers continued to promise more, especially when it came to issues like the environment. Doing more with less money is precisely what the Green Springs activists promised to achieve through the public-private partnership they crafted. Private easements would now protect 14,000 acres from intrusions like prisons and strip mining. To be sure, the Federal government played an important role. But the Feds were joined by those private landowners who voluntarily restricted the use of their land and by Historic Green Springs, Inc., which connected landowners to the National Park Service (NPS).

            The urge to do more with less explains, in part, the fluid state of partisan politics during the 1970s. By 1975, fiscally constrained Federal administrators no longer contemplated massive projects like the national parks built during the New Deal. Both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, emerged from this era with a renewed commitment to public-private partnerships. This was hardly the triumph of the free market so often associated with the "Reagan Era," but it did accommodate growing voter frustration about rising taxes, budget deficits, and centralized control.

            Nor did political parties demand the kind of strict partisan allegiance that paralyzed politics by the twenty-first century. Rae Ely was backed by Republican Secretaries of the Interior under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, even though that support pitted them against Virginia's Republican governor. It could not have been comfortable for Interior Secretary Rogers Morton, a former Republican National Committee chair, to back Linwood Holton's Green Springs opponents. Nor was it easy for President Ford's Secretary of the Interior to publicly pressure a major Republican donor like Peter Grace to forgo mining.

            Republicans and Democrats had already begun to diverge in 1970 over local control, especially when it came to integrating public schools. President Nixon's signature domestic program, the "New Federalism," promised to reverse the flow of power to Washington. In an extraordinary jujitsu move, Ely used the Federal legislation that funded Holton's proposed prison, support that was explicitly designed to cut Federal strings, to circumvent local courts.

 The result was a landmark decision in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that imposed a virtual spider's web of restrictions on how Virginia could use those Federal funds, ruling that other national legislation passed to protect the environment and preserve the nation's history trumped Nixon's pledge to return decisions to "local officials responding to local conditions and local constituencies."[17]

            Nixon appealed to the growing number of Americans who insisted that improving the quality of life for middle-class citizens directly threatened their own economic progress. Louisa County's citizens battled over two contrasting visions of progress. Pushing back against the Green Springs crowd, most Louisans, whatever their attitude about prison reform, recognized an opportunity for job creation when they saw one. Every public official in Louisa County agreed and supported both the prison and mining.

            What began as Nixon's tentative effort to reverse the powerful trend toward nationalizing politics fanned broad rural support for a set of ideals that had long defined the courthouse crowd's agenda. When I started my research in 2010, I viewed many of the arguments mounted by Louisa's ruling oligarchy about race, the sanctity of private property, and the evils of centralized government as the last gasp of a part of America that was vanishing. Rather, these beliefs soon became (many would argue had already become) the foundation for one of the two major political parties in the United States, along with the rural base of voters that supported these appeals.

            One relentless, talented person can make a big political difference when history, strategy, and determination are on her side. Rae Ely faced long odds when Louisa's governing establishment supported Governor Holton and W. R. Grace. Their collective appeal to the residents of this impoverished county was jobs. Ely prevailed because she tapped a new style of participatory politics first crafted by the civil rights movement. She tethered direct citizen engagement to the expertise and regulatory authority of the National Park Service and Department of the Interior. She circumvented local courts, going directly to the Federal judiciary. In redirecting the national government's resources toward preserving history and the environment, she challenged long-standing commitments to government-stimulated economic growth at any cost.

            What began as a personal quest evolved to break a political machine's stranglehold; carve out a space for legitimate debate about ill-conceived plans; and ensure the proper balance between economic growth and concern for the environment as well as cultural resources. Ely's lessons and strategies now resonate across the country and political spectrum in ways she trailblazed but might not have intended. That is because she created the template today deployed by thousands of neighborhood groups who resist any form of development—thwarting, for instance, initiatives to make housing more affordable.

            By the twenty-first century it was easy to poke fun at NIMBYs, as suggested by the growing list of more caustic acronyms such as BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) and NOPE (not on planet earth). Virginia's current governor, a dark horse for the Republican presidential nomination, has been tagged YIMBY (yes in my backyard) in Chief. However, the half-century-long Green Springs battle is a reminder that self-interested motives do not preclude public benefits. Women who had never engaged politically mobilized effectively to fight the courthouse crowd, Governor Holton, and W. R. Grace. Increased political engagement, whatever its motivation, surely counts as a civic gift. So too the tangible alternatives to government or corporate insistence that is "my way or the highway."[18]

            Protecting their own property was hardly the only motivation for the citizens who worked with Rae Ely in Green Springs. They also wanted to preserve what they believed was a national treasure. For some, this was merely the beginning of their political engagement. Because they got involved, residents discovered a history that they had not previously been aware of. Creating and preserving that history enhanced the nation's backyard by protecting a slice of rural history that grows more valuable with the construction of each new Starbucks, especially the one just a few miles down the road from historic Green Springs.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Rae Ely interview, February 1, 2011. Unless otherwise noted, all interviews were conducted by the author.

[2] Rae Ely, e-mails to author, June 7, 2020; Rae Ely interview, February 1, 2011.

[3] T. M. D. to Peter Grace, March 4, 1974, attached to September 14, 1992, Bona to Walsh, Plaintiff's Trial Exhibit [hereafter, PTX] 319, Civil Action No. 3:95CV 0015, Ely Office Files, Antitrust Collection [hereafter, Antitrust Collection].

[4] Rae Ely interviews, February 1 and March 17, 2011.

[5] Bill McKelway and Allen Short, "Amateur Cockfight Was a Real Bust," RTD, May II, 1976; Allen Short, "Six Acquitted in Albemarle Cockfight Case," RTD, August 20, 1976; "Uproar Over Cockfight Ruffles Virginia Gentry," NYT, August 1, 1976.

[6] Rae Ely interview, February 1, 2011.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Rae Ely interviews, July 13 and August 10, 2010, March 22, 2014; Mrs. Hiram Ely Dead," NYT, February 17, 1962; Rae Ely interview, August 5, 2010.

[11] Rae Ely interview, August 5, 2010; Megan Rosenfeld, "Historic-Area Strip Mining Triggers a Fight in Louisa," WAPO, September 5, 1975.

[12] Helen Dewar, "Virginia Prison Site Decided," WAPO, March 31, 1973.

[13] "Saving Green Springs," Time 100, no. 17 (October 23, 1972).

[14] Bill Wayson interview, August 5, 2010. I have capitalized federal when it refers to the national (as opposed to state and local) government to distinguish between the level of government and the federal system of governance embedded in the United States Constitution.

[15] Martha Derthick, Keeping the Compound Republic: Essays on American Federalism (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001), 138.

[16] John Darnton, "Many Big Projects Near City Stymied by Public Protests," NYT, July 18, 1970.

[17] Richard Nixon, "Statement About the General Revenue Sharing Bill, 1972," Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed September 13, 2022. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-about-the-general-revenue-sharing-bill

[18] Ric Stephens, "From NIMBYs to DUDEs: The Wacky World of Plannerese," Planeti-zen, July 26, 2005, https://www.planetizen.com/node/152; Wyatt Gordon, "Governor Glenn Younkin: YIMBY-in-chief?" Virgin72 Mercury, November 21, 2022, accessed November 24, 2022, https:// www.virginiamercury.com/2022/11/21/governor-glenn youngkin-yimby-in-chief/.