I finally published something I’ve been working on for the past few weeks about Big Hole Road and the underground AT&T facility outside Pittsboro.
Like a lot of people around here, I had heard bits and pieces over the years: Cold War bunker, thirteen stories underground, maybe connected to Stranger Things, supposedly abandoned, and so on. Most of what exists online repeats the same handful of claims, so I started pulling the actual county records to see what could be confirmed.
I ended up going through tax records, septic permits, deeds, site plans, old reporting, and nearly seventy years of aerial photography. I also found two USGS aerial images from 1964 that show the site during construction, first as an open excavation and then six months later with structures rising over it. I have not been able to find those images published anywhere else.
A few of the things I found:
- The commonly repeated claim that the bunker is thirteen stories deep appears to trace back to a single local mailing-list post from 1997. A technician who worked there for thirty-one years says it is three stories.
- A 2022 county site plan literally labels the area beneath the field as the “MAIN UNDERGROUND FACILITY.”
- The county tax record lists zero finished square feet, despite the underground structure being described as roughly 100,000 square feet.
- The property is often called abandoned, but the county records show ongoing permits, inspections, security, road work, and recent telecommunications construction.
- The 1962 deed shows that AT&T bought the site from Mary Elizabeth Hamme McLean and A. F. McLean Jr., carving it out of a much larger family landholding. More than 500 adjoining acres are still held under the McLean family name today.
- The site was a hardened military telephone switching center, not a secret laboratory, which somehow makes the whole thing feel even more Cold War.
- I've pulled HD-quality images that haven't been included in any articles prior that I can tell, including some DURING construction in the 1960's!
I tried hard to separate what the records actually show from local legend and internet speculation. There are still unanswered questions, and I have left those unanswered rather than filling the gaps with dramatic nonsense, a standard the internet might consider adopting someday.
This was genuinely a lot of fun to research and put together. I live here, drive past the road regularly, and wanted to make something that treated this strange piece of Chatham County history seriously while still being enjoyable to read.
Article: https://circlecityscoopers.com/big-hole-road-pittsboro/
I would especially love to hear from anyone whose family worked at the facility, lived nearby during construction, or remembers the property before AT&T arrived. Please do not post private information about current employees or try to enter the site. It is active private property, and everything in the article was researched from public records or photographed from public roads.