AT&T Chatham Big Hole Site, North Carolina

This AT&T site south of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was built by AT&T in the 1960s. The station is part of the company’s communications infrastructure, and especially the part of it related to military communications. It is the southernmost of four other facilities in the region known as Project Offices. These sites had several antennas, including large concrete paraboloids used for tropospheric communications. Like the others, it also has an underground bunker of at least several thousand square feet, and a drive-in entrance. In addition to its communication function, these Project Office sites were reported to have had facilities for government officials to be housed in the event of a nuclear attack, part of the continuity of government program, which included the congressional bunker at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, where a communications panel listed this site as Chatham. The other Project Office sites are closer to the nation’s capitol, and the reason for this location, further away, is unclear. It is even more curious, as its communication connection to the others through the large tropospheric antennas was enabled through a relay facility, which was built at great expense. (That site, the Buckingham Relay Site in Virginia, also had an underground facility, is now out of service, and privately owned as part of a residence). This facility is currently still owned by AT&T, and was in use in some form until recently. Reports from 2008 suggest that much of the equipment was removed that summer.