Playing the shale game: its blasts killed coal miners. Now the natural gas locked in rock under Lee County is causing another kind of explosion.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: COVER STORY

Pushing away overhanging vines, David Phillips muscles aside a rusty metal plate taller than he is and nearly as wide as his outstretched arms. In this Lee County community once known as Coal Glen, trucks wallow through General Timber Inc.'s lumberyard, shuttling wood to be creosoted against rot. Phillips, an employee, peers into the hole before him. As silent as a sarcophagus, it breathes dank air into the daylight. Rails, like a train's, slope down into utter blackness. "This," he says, "is as far as we go."

There's no marker, just weeds and bushes. A few miles away in the crossroads of Gulf at the general store where J.R. Moore & Son has sold groceries, feed, hardware, clothing and shoes since 1935, customers look puzzled when asked about this place. At 9:30 on a May morning in 1925, windows for miles around rattled and bilious smoke belched from the mouth of the Carolina Coal Co. mine, also known as the Farmville Mine. Superintendent Howard Butler, the 29-year-old son of the owner, rushed in to rescue trapped miners but was almost killed in a second blast. Dragged to safety, he staggered back to try again just before a third explosion tore through the mine. He barely survived. Fifty-three others didn't.

Coal Glen has vanished from maps and, with it, memory of North Carolina's worst industrial disaster. By the time of the explosion, at least a dozen mines had operated around here, going back before the Revolutionary War. Many ended in blasts, bankruptcy or both. More than 200 died in explosions. Those at the nearby Egypt Mine in 1895 and 1900 killed 40. The 1925 blast left 38 widows and 79 orphans. In clutches around freshly dug graves, murmurs spread. Something deep underground, the superstitious whispered, guarded its wealth. The devil was gas.

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This spring, rumors circulate again. Outsiders bearing papers are knocking on doors. Some people, educated and savvy about commerce and law, sign confidently. Among them are Howard Butler's son Daniel, whose business card reads "minerals and real estate." Others, including the elderly with dim eyes and weak hearing, put their names to confusing words and phrases. "The lessee is hereby granted the right ..."

On June 16, more than 250 people stream into the old Lee County courthouse in Sanford until the fire marshal blocks the door, stranding dozens outside. A young woman from the local Agricultural Extension Service office introduces a man from Raleigh, James Simons, who explains that he's the chief state geologist. He starts with a laugh. "My boss wants to know, 'What are y'all doing down there, trying to sell shares?'"

Senior geologist Jeffrey Reid, his short-sleeved white shirt open at the collar, describes something beneath the surface eight miles west of town that he calls the Cumnock Formation. To most here, Cumnock is a wide spot in the road two miles from the Coal Glen shaft, just a rusty old camelback bridge over Deep River, volunteer fire department and Bud's Barbeque. Reid explains that it's no surprise that the killer at Carolina Coal--gas--is abundant here. Gas and coal are geological cousins. But now, he tells the gathering, there are new ways to pry it from the porous rock. Some geologists think there might be enough down there to meet the natural-gas needs of the whole state for 40 years.

Others warn of the vagaries of the natural-gas industry. Mining laws must be changed, Prices fluctuate. A lawyer cautions them about unscrupulous speculators and legitimate wildcatters--the men and companies that come in first, gambling millions in high-risk exploration but extracting correspondingly high returns if they strike it rich and sell their finds to production companies. Some who signed in haste sheepishly begin studying their folded hands. Their misgivings will come into clearer focus a few weeks later when, back in Raleigh, state Utilities Commission analysts help compute the value of 40 years' worth of natural gas--about $80 billion in 2010 dollars.

The meeting over, a soft murmur trails the crowd out the door. Unlike those earlier times, the whispers aren't about a malevolent force deep in the earth. They are about prospects for new lifeblood in a region long skirted by the state's urban prosperity. About potential disappointments and false hopes, deals and money to be made--maybe, some say, even riches. This time, the...