From Garden Ridge to New Braunfels, 'Quarry Row' has residents demanding stricter regulation

Growing up in the Texas Hill Country, Mark Friesenhahn would often run barefoot through the countryside with his younger brother — but only if their father, “a 150-pound, mean little banty rooster German, full of the culture and work ethic,” hadn’t assigned them a task on the family farm. Occasionally, the boys would hear a siren warning of an imminent blast at the Servtex Quarry Plant three miles away. “The blast would occur, we’d feel the rumble, and we went back to what we were doing. It was no big deal,” recalled Friesenhahn, now 71. Friesenhahn spent more than four decades at ExxonMobil in Houston as a technical adviser on oil and gas operations. He moved back to his boyhood haunts in 2010 to grow soft-shell pecans on the same land settled by his German ancestors in 1854. Today, Friesenhahn’s inherited slice of the Hill Country is surrounded by “Quarry Row,” a cluster of 11 rock mining operations that stretches for nearly 30 miles along Interstate 35, from the Servtex quarry in Garden Ridge to the Colorado Materials Hunter Plant 2 north of New Braunfels. The proliferation of quarries has altered more than the landscape. It’s changed Friesenhahn’s worldview.

He’s a conservative Republican who made his fortune in the oil and gas industry. He’s long been a believer in free markets, low taxes and light regulation. But living in quarry country has turned him into a leading voice for tighter controls on mining. He co-founded Texans for Responsible Aggregate Mining and regularly testifies at the state Capitol to demand more rigorous oversight of the industry. One morning in June 2020, a farmhand called Friesenhahn to tell him his orchard had been flooded with thick, sediment-laden water — “think cream-colored yogurt that is as gooey as you could possibly imagine.” The source: the neighboring AC Tejas Quarry, operated by Anderson Columbia Co. Inc. Water used to wash rocks was being treated in a sediment pond, and it had overflowed. About 500,000 gallons of water and clay sediment had flowed under a railroad trestle and onto Friesenhahn’s property, covering 15 acres of his orchard to a depth of a foot and a half. He complained to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, triggering an investigation. The agency found the quarry was pumping more water into the pond than it could remove, too much sediment had accumulated and the pond suffered from a “lack of maintenance.” The TCEQ opted not to take samples of the gunk, a decision that bothered the former oilman because it “could have been a toxic material.”