FRANKLIN COUNTY — The buzzy call of the dickcissel — dick-dick-see-see-see — and the rustle of spring winds hitting wild grasses are drowned out by the revving and thuds of a wooden flatbed on unplowed terrain and the occasional yaps by one passenger, Mickey the Yorkie.

B.F. Hicks sits at the helm of the trailer. He blares his yellow coach’s whistle, signaling to the driver to stop.

Trill. Trill. Trill.

With his pressed khaki work shirt, faded light wash blue jeans and whistle dangling from around his neck, Hicks resembles a lawyerly Scout master. His accompanying tour group chuckles at his militant pageantry. For a fleeting moment, everything within these 922 acres of native prairie land is silent but the birds and the wind.

On this Tuesday evening in May, Hicks is moonlighting as a docent at his family’s property, Daphne Prairie. He’s Franklin County’s clearinghouse: kin to half its population, executor of its wills, steward of its history and its crusader against a $64 billion energy industry posed to take over its land and, with it, its heritage.

Hicks gets up and points past a distant tree line. About 100 miles slightly northeast of Dallas, the Texas sky is unobscured: There are no telephone wires or poles, no city lights, no distant highway traffic.

“That’s up for solar development.”

He points again.

“That’s leased to solar.”

“Not only would I be looking at panels,” he says, “but a huge transmission line.”

Hicks’ prairie — which once created a way of life for Indigenous people, settlers and generations onward — its mima mounds, rare silveus’ dropseed and longspike tridens are being threatened by rapid development of utility-scale solar farms in northeast Texas. Franklin, with less than 11,000 people, was once a vibrant, pastoral community, rich with natural resources and steeped in heritage dating back to before the republic. But when farming bottomed out and ranchers needed income, leasing land to energy companies — largely to install swooping transmission lines across their properties — seemed like a progressive and environmentally friendly stream of revenue. The fallout has changed the culture and pitted neighbors against neighbors, some residents say.

Utility-scale solar farms, a renewable form of energy that harnesses sunrays, funnel much-needed energy into Texas’ shaky power grid and keep electricity humming in megalopolises hundreds of miles away from its source. On any given January day, North Texas demands more energy than any other region in the state, and solar power accounts for about 17% of the grid’s capacity, the latest report from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas shows. As hundreds of people move to North Texas per day, industry booms, high-voltage data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations crop up, and the climate becomes more extreme, solar is vital to stabilizing the grid and managing electricity bills.

But utility-scale solar farms need large swaths of land, the kind of topography you can’t find in dense cities and urban-sprawl suburbs, like Dallas-Fort Worth. The abundance of uninterrupted space in Franklin and nearby counties makes them ripe for developing a new energy frontier. The projects are also injecting millions into localities. A January report estimated as much as $20.2 billion in new tax revenue for these communities. A spokeswoman for one energy company said they are “dedicated to supporting the state’s diversified energy grid — increasing reliability and affordability and improving resilience to keep Texans powered.”

Despite the good it might do elsewhere — like for North Texas’ nearly 8.5 million people — Hicks and a cohort of solar farm oppositionists view the solar energy explosion as a plague. The “unregulated invasion” en masse of renewable energy projects is killing off the environment, they say, gutting their land and destroying the soul of northeast Texas buried in the soil. They are not vehemently anti-solar; they advocate for installing solar panels on existing “gray” infrastructure, like homes, large warehouses, parking garages, gas stations or even cars.

This same tug-of-war over land use is playing out across the country, as dozens of communities like Franklin County fight back and stop solar development.

Land for this often forgotten corner of the state is everything: inheritance, birthright, survival and blood.

***

Texans have a love affair with their land, and pride in vast, open spaces is woven in the state’s cultural fabric: Indigenous people viewed land as sentient, and Europeans who colonized what became Texas felt they “conquered” it. They tilled and cut down trees to make inhospitable land more habitable, cultivating a strong, intimate connection to their agriculture, according to undergraduate research from Indiana University on agritourism and multiple accounts of the state’s history.

This stewardship and respect for their land remains a bedrock for Franklin County and its county seat, Mount Vernon: Forty acres and a mule once could support a family here, representative of the post-Civil War Southern lifestyle, according to an 1998 anthology authored by Hicks. A livelihood and an economy was built a century ago on this soil — from rich alluvium along streams, sandy clays, light sand to black wax clay — which made it Texas’ fruit basket. Farmers harvested cotton and corn and shipped cane syrup, melons and peaches by the wagonful. A 1922 edition of the Dallas Times Herald read, “FERTILE FRANKLIN COUNTY SMALL BUT PROSPEROUS: Mount Vernon Centers One of the Most Prolific Agricultural Sections in the Northeastern Part of the State.”

“You could be born here, you could be educated here, receive all of your medical care, your dental care, buy a car here from a plethora of different dealerships. You could do all of your shopping here. And then you could die here,” Lauren Lewis, executive director of the Franklin County Historical Association, said in May, surrounded by former Cowboys quarterback and Mount Vernon legend “Dandy” Don Meredith memorabilia displayed on the ground floor of the old 1940 fire station-turned-museum.

“Everything you needed, you never really had to leave Mount Vernon,” Lewis said.

Agriculture collapsed during the Great Depression and industrial manufacturing moved in. Texas’ economic growth and population boom since the late 1990s has eaten up countryside statewide, which has hiked land prices and with it, incentivized hundreds of property owners all over the state to subdivide or sell.

About 81% of Texas is privately owned working land, according to Texas Land Trends. By contrast, most of the state’s population, nearly 84%, live in urban communities, packed into metro areas like Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. Texas is losing its rural lands faster than any other state, the nonprofit Texas Land Conservancy reports; from 1997 to 2022, Texas lost about 3.7 million acres of its working land, trends show, and more than 17,700 farms — or another 7% — disappeared between 2017 and 2022, according to the Census of Agriculture.

Franklin County had 117,707 acres of grazing land in 1997, covering about 62% of the roughly 295-square-mile county. By 2022, the county lost nearly 12%, or more than 1 in every 10 acres, of this land, data shows.

“Young people need to know their heritage,” said resident Mary Lou Russell-Mowery, a retired educator and 40-year veteran cattle rancher. “It’s who they are, it’s where their roots are.”

“You have got to have agriculture,” Russell-Mowery, 83, said, “and you’re seeing a lot of that lost nowadays.”

A North Dakota-native who grew up in a grain farming community, Joel Dihle has lived in Mount Vernon for about a decade: “There’s a whole lot of advantages to living in a community this size versus in the middle of Dallas. [Children here] know where their food comes from,” he said.

“And it’s not Brookshire’s back door.”

Since at least 2020, anywhere from a quarter to a third of Franklin County’s agricultural land — according to some estimates by county leaders — has been leased to solar companies by friends and neighbors, cultivating new income for some residents while frustrating others who feel their community is being industrialized by outsiders. While not all of this land is slated for panels, the leases, waivers and agreements arranged with solar companies turn over mineral rights, grant access to properties and allow transmission towers and lines, the connective tissue of the energy grid. Franklin County landowners can expect $158 million in payments over the lifetime of solar projects, according to an economic study published in January.

Solar and wind are the fastest-growing renewable energies nationwide, as the country shifts away from finite resources like coal, oil and natural gas and the cost of the technology rapidly declines. Renewables generate power and emit far less greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Rising levels of these heat-trapping gases — released, for example, when fossil fuels are burned — cause global warming and climate change, scientists say.

Texas’ solar capacity surpassed that of California in 2024, Reuters reported. By the end of last year, the state was about to generate enough electricity to light 2,200 Cowboys games at AT&T Stadium.

America’s once-crude oil country now runs on renewables, which are vital for Texans as the state’s consumption surges: Solar contributed nearly a quarter of power needs midday from June 1 to Aug. 31, 2024, and average wholesale electricity prices during that period were about 71% cheaper than 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

“If Texans want to keep their air conditioners on and not have their energy bills double over the next few years, solar is a great way to meet that demand,” said Austin-based energy expert Doug Lewin. He said the amount of land renewables take up is overstated; even the most aggressive projections use less than 1% of Texas’ landmass, he said.

“Energy bills could get a lot worse, and if you start down a path of solar projects getting rejected, that will start to happen,” Lewin said.

***

On a recent Monday in May, a waft of smoke billowed from the basement of Hicks’ house, the Church Inn. It’s Mount Vernon’s old, 1930s Methodist church, where his parents married and he was baptized. The main floor still has the pews and the pulpit; a red blanket is draped over a seat in the back row, where his grandmother sat and shivered when the church got air conditioning in 1964. Hicks, an estate lawyer, has only had one garage sale in his life — an awful experience, he said — so he maintains his home like a museum: In the nave, flint arrowheads and artifacts are labeled and displayed in vintage general store glass cabinets. The former Sunday school rooms downstairs have been converted into his apartment.

“I’ve burned the creamed peas,” Hicks, 73, shouted from the lower-level kitchen. He was expecting a group for dinner: friends, an official with the county water district and the three-term mayor of Mount Vernon. He laid the nine-person table with chinaware and crystal, readied a three-course meal and aired out the smokey haze of burnt peas before the guests arrived.

Hicks’ dining table has become a repository — the local newspaper folded, so chitchat over baguettes and baba ganoush, pork tenderloin with potatoes, carrots and onions has become the tasty means to circulate information. By dessert, a buffet of egg custard pie, blackberry cobbler, vanilla ice cream and sugar cookies, the conversation meandered into the latest rumors of who has sold which property to what company.

“I didn’t know — I thought they were going to make more pastures,” Hicks said. “I didn’t realize it was up for solar panels.”

“It didn’t happen overnight,” Mayor Brad Hyman chimed. The volunteer mayor never anticipated his own plight to save his trees, his property, would become a battle for a whole community, some of whom saw their land — their prosperity, hard work and history — being degraded or devalued.

“A lot of stuff happened before we saw the damage from it,” Hyman said. “I’ve got a passion for my town, and I’m very protective of it.”

***

In October 2020, the mayor’s sons were out hunting on their family’s 650 acres of wooded preserve, full of wild turkeys, feral hogs, deer, ducks and doves. The land is a playground for the Hymans: Here they shoot, fish and ride ATVs across rugged, muddy terrain. The older of the two sons approached the end of their property, a century-old line divided by old bodark fence posts. Dense timber should have butted up to that fence line. Instead, the forest gave way to a clearing. The massive trees had been chopped and strewn across the Hymans’ land.

Hyman called their neighbor just beyond the fence: What’s going on? The neighbor agreed to an easement — legal right to use someone else’s private property — for a power line, according to Hyman. Hyman said he didn’t know what the line was for that day when the workers showed up in white, unmarked trucks.

The Hymans didn’t have the money to mount a legal fight and allowed the power company onto their land in November, another easement, to build a transmission that cut right through the woods. The thick cable connected to Invenergy’s Samson Solar Energy Center in Cunningham, less than 20 miles north of Mount Vernon, Hyman later learned. A spokeswoman for Invenergy said the transmission line is the only part of the Samson center that extends into Franklin. She declined to comment on Hyman’s allegations, saying the company “has respect for landowner privacy and our discussions with property owners remain confidential.” (Another Invenergy solar project, Delilah II, in Red River County has been contracted to procure energy for Meta Platforms, the online social networking company that owns Facebook and Instagram, among others, according to a December news release.)

“I like this bottomland,” Hyman said. The power line radiates a constant hum, like an overheated computer or swarm of cicadas looming overhead. “It’s a place to let others enjoy, and if this goes away, if we just keep clearing all this timber out, for the sake of a solar panel, I think that’s pretty sad.”

“This was just a transmission line, we didn’t know it was going to a solar farm,” he said. “The same thing is happening, over and over and over.”

***

Leases for solar projects — like Stockyard, Stampede, Saddle House, Lupinus — showed up as early as 2019, Franklin County land records show. What Mayor Hyman thought in October 2020 was an isolated issue and only contained to a strip of forest on his land, had ballooned by summer 2022.

Mount Vernon ISD that year considered tax breaks for two solar developers. Then a grassroots movement of residents organized to fight Big Solar.

Franklin County’s opposition movement “raised hell” at public forums, collected 1,300 signatures for petitions to ban solar projects, and got the county commissioners to impose a 180-day moratorium on commercial solar development.

“Dirty green energy isn’t wanted in this county,” one resident said at a three-hour school board meeting.

“Stop and think about what you’re doing for generations to come,” another said.

In a March 2023 letter to the attorney general, county Commissioner Jerry Cooper wrote: “I have listened to citizens in ongoing hearings since August 2022. New concerns arise each week.” The commissioners later withdrew the moratorium, and the Texas attorney general’s office ruled that local officials didn’t have the authority to block companies’ rights to leased land.

Cooper serves Franklin County’s north end. Cooper’s precinct, he says, was the first to be transected by new transmission lines. He worries how development will soon affect property values.

“It’ll destroy our little county,” Cooper said.

In 2023, Hicks and Franklin County couple Gary and Kathy Boren, hired a private Plano-based attorney and sued a utility solar company and a neighboring “landman” over plans to install 620,000 solar panels and a battery energy storage system. Hicks and the Borens argued in the suit that the solar farm would shed waste, increase erosion and create a heat island and noise pollution. According to court documents, the solar panels would surround on three sides Hicks’ family’s Daphne Prairie, which was placed under a conservation easement with the Native Prairies Association of Texas in 2016 in an effort to preserve the unspoiled land.

A solar farm will destroy the natural views across the horizon. It would be detrimental to surrounding wildlife, especially birds. The value of the land would decrease, Hicks believes.

The proposed solar farm also would put the Boren’s 5-acre property within 200 yards of a battery energy storage system. Battery storage stows energy, which can be used to bolster or steady supply when demand is high.

What about toxins, gases or fires, the Borens worry.

A spokesman for the solar company, Enel, declined to comment. The lawsuit is ongoing in federal court.

***

Matt White walked intentionally through a strip of tall grass along a farm-to-market road in Lamar County one morning in May. The northwestern tip of Franklin County intersects Lamar, Delta, Hopkins and Red River counties.

White’s hands lingered in the swaying grass, stopping at a droopy pale purple coneflower. The wind ripped and howled.

“This is an Echinacea pallida, it’s a very rare plant,” he said giddily. A history professor at nearby Paris Junior College, an author and conservationist, White studies and writes about prairieland. He’s able to identify species by their Latin and common names, and rattle off a fact, or two, about each.

He swiftly moved on to the next plant: “And this is one of the rarest grasses in North America right here, it’s called silveus’ dropseed.” He pointed out milkweed and plucked it off the stem as latex-like sap oozes out.

Blackland Prairie covered 12 million acres of gently rolling to nearly flat landscapes from the Red River to San Antonio. Birds, bees and butterflies depend on grasslands for survival, and the grasses pull carbon from the atmosphere and absorb floodwater. Most of this prairie has been plowed, tracts sold off to farmers then developers who built concrete cities, like Dallas, atop the rich soil.

A fraction of a percent — about 5,000 acres, less than 8 square miles — remains, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

“We still have this attitude that nature is inextinguishable,” White said, “that nature is giving and giving and giving. We’re losing farm land, we’re losing prairie land, we’re losing our history.”

The patch where White stood, bounded by a two-lane road and a wired fence, was part of the Smiley Woodfin Native Prairie Grassland, once the largest remaining section of tallgrass prairie in the state. Just beyond the fence this June, hard-hat workers in neon construction vests tramped across aisles of solar arrays. In a dirt lot filled with office trailers and an equipment yard, hung a sign: America the Renewable: Adding Green to our beloved Red, White and Blue.

“One of these days we’re going to wake up, and it’s all going to be gone, and I don’t know what kind of world that’s going to be,” White said, looking out at a rolling sea of black and steel. “This is an attempt to go after the last of the open spaces — the green spaces.”

Smiley-Woodfin was hot for development: It is flat, vast and close to transmission interconnection. Crisscrossing cables from the nearby Monticello Power Plant in Titus County came westward through Franklin County and surrounding counties for decades. In 2018, the coal plant shuttered, leaving room to pump in new energy sources.

Ørsted — an energy company in Denmark that operates nine solar farms globally, six of which are operational in the United States — approached three landowners in 2019 about leasing or selling their land for solar development, according to a spokeswoman. The meadows’ namesake had just sold the land to a limited partnership, which in 2021 granted Ørsted an easement to build Mockingbird Solar Center, a roughly 3,900-acre solar farm, according to public land transactions.

Before construction broke ground, David Bezanson of the environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy in Texas alerted Ørsted to the ecological significance of the prairie. Despite being among the rarest and most rapidly vanishing ecosystems, there are no formal legal protections for native prairies, unlike endangered wildlife or wetlands. Owners of some grasslands — like Hicks’ Daphne Prairie — may enter into conservation easements to preserve their land, Bezanson said. Ørsted agreed to set aside about 1,000 acres with the greatest number of rare grasses and wildflowers for conservation. Arrays of solar panels were installed on the other roughly 1 square mile. Enough energy is farmed here and pumped into ERCOT’s grid to power nearly 80,000 homes and businesses throughout the state.

News of Smiley-Woodfin’s sale and looming development alarmed conservationists: Bulldozing, grading and installing steel posts feet into the last stretch of unfiled prairie will disrupt topsoil and fungus that nurture flora, according to Hicks and Pat Merkord, retired executive director of the Native Prairies Association of Texas. And while energy companies say the land can be restored after a solar farm is decommissioned, Hicks and Merkord disagree. Hicks worries about the precedent this sets for his Daphne Prairie.

“Destroying all that on the surface,” Merkord said, “we don’t know what it’s going to take to recover it.”

Ørsted also boasts its investments in localities and the passive income landowners can make. The Mockingbird project is estimated to inject $80 million into the local economy over the life of the project — at least 30 years — creating a new tax revenue stream. The company patrons local businesses and donated more than $50,000 to volunteer fire departments in nearby Brookston and Roxton.

Over their lifetimes, the state’s fleet of existing and expected energy projects as of a January report were estimated to pay landowners up to $29.5 billion.

“We believe there is an urgency to build out renewable energy, but we want to make sure that as we’re developing projects, we don’t further engage in the biodiversity crisis,” spokeswoman Charlotte Bellotte said in a statement. “Ørsted is committed to building renewable energy projects in a responsible, nature conscious manner with the protection of native species and natural habitats in mind.”

White, Hicks and others who oppose utility-scale solar farms are not anti-solar. Many are naturalists, who understand that renewable energy is an important piece of slowing the effects of climate change and ultimately saving the environment, the flora and the fauna they love. But they don’t want to see greenery destroyed by industries hellbent on saving it. Instead, they advocate for pragmatic solutions, like installing solar panels on existing infrastructure.

“Would we put solar panels on the Alamo?” White opined.

“Maybe we should put them on the hotel next door.”

***

What Hicks, Hyman and others in Franklin County are experiencing could be the new reality for rural America. Communities nationwide rejected or restricted at least 79 solar and 42 wind projects in 2024, according to a database maintained by Austin-based author and journalist Robert Bryce. He believes there is no “vacant land” — “local people everywhere care about what happens in their towns and neighborhoods.”

The total number of rejected or restricted renewable projects in the U.S. spiked almost 200% in five years, from 255 in 2019 to 764 in 2024, according to the database. In November for example, Bryce’s database shows, a Louisiana parish zoning commission struck down plans for a solar facility after residents packed a public meeting and voiced concerns about flooding, wildlife and property values. Globally, Italy’s right-wing coalition last year banned installing solar panels on agricultural land.

Some in Franklin County feel their pocket of Texas is being exploited for the benefit of Dallasites. The resounding sentiment is that northeast Texas is “out of sight, out of mind.” “They’re not living here and watching what it’s doing to us — it’s an abstract,” said Lewis, of the historical society. Research by the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 raised alarms about the equity of where utility-scale solar farms were being built: The analysis suggested that large solar farms are more likely to be in areas where the residents earn less than the national average income.

“There’s one thing that kind of unites everyone: People, especially in Texas, love their land,” Merkord said. “The cultural heritage of their land ownership is a big thing for a lot of people, and you’re having to sit back and see it destroyed.”

“That’s a powerful thing.”

Regulating renewables may gain momentum in the state Legislature this session. Republican lawmakers, including a North Texas representative, have filed proposals to increase government oversight over new wind, solar and battery storage projects; require buffers between these projects and neighboring properties; allow counties to ban battery storage projects within a quarter-mile of a home; and impose environmental fees and studies for new renewable developments. Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump also signed executive orders that would make oil and gas production cheaper and block clean energy projects.

***

In an offshoot community meeting room attached to Penelope’s Coffee Co. on Mount Vernon’s main commercial drag, about 50 people, including Franklin County’s Republican party chair, from a handful of northeast Texas counties chatted over deli sandwiches in September.

The Franklin County Environmental Action Council convened this town hall, advertised as a “wind, solar, battery storage, carbon sequestration” Q&A complete with “exhibits, food and fellowship.” For more than an hour that Saturday night, people — including Michael Pickens, grandson of the oil and gas magnate T. Boone Pickens, who said a renewable energy project destroyed his mother’s wetlands and pollution made the waters smell like rotting carcasses — rattled off personal anecdotes about how solar development has impacted them. Attendees were encouraged to take home “Stop Industrial Solar” yard signs.

“I see a lot of familiar faces and some different ones,” president David Truesdale told the audience as they settled into their folding chairs. Pamphlets, leaflets and posters littered a row of tables pressed up against a wall.

Truesdale is used to being in charge of things; a former civilian special agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, he’s run criminal, counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations and operations. When the former president of the group walked out, members looked around and thought, What about David? “I was kind of voluntold,” he snickered, recounting his rapid ascent to leadership.

He moved to Mount Vernon during the pandemic, searching for a bucolic oasis from Dallas. He’s lived near military installations most of his life, haunted by the sounds of airplanes taking flight and artillery pounding. His 57-acres of pasture and woods — a “slice of heaven,” he calls it — provided relief from the constant chaos and death he’d grown weary of.

Sitting on his front porch, a speckle among the wide open spaces, and listening to night noises unadulterated by noisy traffic calms him.

He was blindsided two months after he moved in to learn his neighbor leased his land to solar, Truesdale said. Where do my rights end and my neighbor’s rights begin, he asks.

Truesdale wonders when the serenity he sought will be gone.

The sounds of crickets and the occasional frog drowned out by electronic static.