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Overview:
Oakridge Rocks the Park was a free event organized largely by one Oakridge woman trying to show a community fighting against a controversial quarry project.
Su Stella treasures the quiet around her Oakridge home.
It’s a world away from where she spent her childhood, in Boston, and part of what drew Stella, 60, to Oakridge in the first place. During a phone interview with Lookout Eugene-Springfield, she stuck her phone in the air to demonstrate the silence.
But a controversial quarry project that has lingered for a decade, and the rock crusher that could sit atop TV Butte if it comes to fruition, threatens the quiet she loves.
In response, she started painting rocks.
More than 500 rocks were painted by Stella and other volunteers for a free community event Saturday, Oct. 18, that Stella organized. The goal? To raise awareness and money for a nonprofit group called Oakridge Strong and its legal fight against the quarry.
The Oakridge Rocks the Park event filled Greenwaters Park with vendors, live music, raffle tickets, a chili cook-off and a craft station for painting rocks to distribute in the park, in addition to the hundreds Stella had gathered.
“I am louder than a rock crusher,” she said. “I am, because if I have to listen to a rock crusher for the rest of my life, I’m being loud now.”
Stella has lived in Oakridge for nine years. She and her husband, both travel writers and artists, lived in Biloxi, Mississippi, when Hurricane Katrina hit.
They moved inland to Shreveport, Louisiana, for years before wanting to join friends in Cottage Grove and escape the southern heat. But the couple instead fell in love with Oakridge, enamored with the scenery on the drive down Highway 58.
TV Butte is just east of Oakridge city limits, visible from much of the small town itself. It’s an informal name, given for the analog television equipment that was visible on the land in the mid-20th century.
The quarry project, to extract gravel and crushed rocks, was first proposed in 2015 by Old Hazeldell Quarry LLC, a company under Crown Properties, a family trust for the King family, of King Estate Winery and Ed King. The King name was frequently invoked at Oakridge Rocks the Park, on signs and by speakers.
An attorney for Old Hazeldell Quarry and Crown Properties did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Lookout.
Oakridge residents have repeatedly organized against the project. Community concerns around the quarry are myriad: increased traffic from gravel trucks, harmful silica dust in the air, impact on the longtime elk calving grounds on TV Butte. It was protecting those elk that led to a previous push for the quarry to be struck down, in 2021.
Stella moved to Oakridge after this had begun, but she started getting involved with Save TV Butte four years ago, when she realized the proposed quarry would be near the Willamette Fish Hatchery. She felt renewed urgency after the Lane County Commissioners, in a 3-2 vote in January, as reported by the Register-Guard, approved a proposal to rezone 46 acres of forest to build the quarry.
So for the last six months, she organized Oakridge Rocks the Park. Stella said she did every cheap thing she could think of to make the event happen. She got the city of Oakridge to waive the rental fee on the park and contribute a few tent canopies.
She asked people around town to volunteer and man tables. She pulled in local musicians like the Oakridge Ukeleleans for the day’s live entertainment.
Even the choice of painted rocks is a budget friendly activity to center the event around. Stella said everyone with a garden in town knows that if you dig, you’ll find rocks. The rocks were distributed around Greenwaters Park, in what Stella hopes will become a decorative calling card for the town.
Sabrina Ratkowski, the organizational chair of the Save TV Butte movement and the chair of Oakridge Strong, the formal nonprofit it operates under, said she’s always happy when someone runs a fundraiser for her cause. But Oakridge Rocks the Park, and Stella’s determination to pull it together, was particularly impressive.
On Saturday Ratkowski manned the Oakridge Strong table, selling raffle tickets to benefit the nonprofit’s legal fund.
“She has been fantastic,” Ratkowski said. “This crazy lady over here is just buzzing around like a bee, getting it done.”
Deanna Wellman, 65, has lived in Oakridge since she was 15. She represented the Oakridge Pioneer Museum, which raffled off a quilt.
“There’s a lot of historical significance on that hill, starting with the very earliest settlers here, the Native Americans,” Wellman said.
Now, Ratkowski and Stella are waiting for the next step in the quarry’s proposal, to come in the form of another scheduled meeting with county commissioners on the project. Ratskowski said the legal work to come will be in the form of appeals filed against Old Hazeldell Quarry.
A chili cook-off and crafts for children may seem like a mild tactic to face down a well-resourced mining company. But for Stella, as years-old bureaucratic drama continues, showing a cohesive community against the quarry is intentional.
She’s planning for another event next spring.
“The only way I can see an end to this, after doing research for years now, is smiling children having fun,” she said. “That’s the only thing I can think of that we have left.”
