A chestnut brown horse pokes its head out of its stall. A black and white barn cat leaps down from a beam, nuzzling its head into Leath's hands.

The Leaths bought 32 acres off Orange Chapel Hill Clover Garden Road in 1993. They handpicked every tree they took down for their house and barn to keep the land thick with hardwoods. Four deer graze along the long, gravel driveway.

They didn't think about losing their property until Leath ran into White Cross neighbor Warren Ray at the recycling center. Ray raises beef cattle on land his wife's family has lived on since the Civil War.

"I said, Warren, how are you?" Leath recalled.

"He said, 'I'm just devastated.

"The university's going to take my land, and they're going to take your land too."

The Leaths, Rays and other families live on Site H west of Carrboro in southwest Orange County's White Cross community. A 2005 report by university consultants Talbert & Bright ranked it a top location for a new Orange County airport.

Not much happened after that report, which university officials say exists only in a Powerpoint presentation. Neighbors say they went on with their lives.

Then state lawmakers passed a bill last summer authorizing the UNC system to establish an airport authority.

The 15-member panel will have the power to site, build and operate a general aviation airport in Orange County. It will have the power of eminent domain, the ability to take private property for the public good.

Now, the community is organizing --"No Airport" signs have sprouted like campaign placards -- even though UNC leaders say the airport authority will have to begin its search anew.

The university needs a new airport to replace Horace Williams Airport in Chapel Hill, which officials say they must close in order to build the planned Carolina North campus. The airport is home to the university's Area Health Education Centers fleet, which flies health care workers to underserved areas around the state.

But medical flights account for only a quarter of flights at Horace Williams, and neighbors say they think other interests are driving the issue.

Compounding their frustration is the fact that the county commissioners -- this unincorporated area's only elected representatives -- say they, too, have been left out of the loop. Barry Jacobs, chairman of the Orange County Board of Commissioners, has said the county would not be discussing an airport had the university not pushed the bill through the legislature.

"This got slipped under the wire," said Leath. "No public debate. No nothing."

Mike Teer, Gold Mine Loop Road

A corner of the proposed runway at Site H cuts across Mike Teer's cornfield off Gold Mine Loop Road.

Teer's family milks about 100 Holsteins and grows enough corn on 120 acres to fill three silos. He recently finished shelling the corn, a process that removes the kernels from the cob, and began planting wheat. They also grow soybeans and sorghum.

Teer's great grandfather and two of his sons started the dairy in 1927. They fed the milk to pigs and sold the cream to an ice cream plant in Durham. Teer remembers they used to sit the metal milk cans in a stream until it was time to take them to the plant.

This isn't the first time the Teers could lose their land.

Teer says they bought their current land with money they got in a settlement when they lost about 70 acres to Cane Creek Reservoir, the main source of drinking water for Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

Ironic, Teer says flatly.

He'd like to think the family could find more land again if the airport came. But he's not sure.

"We're so close to Chapel Hill," he said, peering through sunglasses into the November sun. "I ride around the country now. The only thing growing here is houses."

A growing community has needs, he concedes. White Cross is also being considered for the county's future solid waste transfer station.

But if the county needs a place to consolidate its trash, why doesn't it put the transfer station on the way to the Virginia landfill where the trash will be shipped to? And if UNC's medical fleet needs an airport close to campus, why is the university building Carolina North on top of the airport it already owns?

"I just got a feeling it has nothing to do with AHEC," Teer said. "I think there's something else behind this."

"It just makes no sense to me."

Jutta Kuenzler. Old Greensboro Road

Jutta Kuenzler, 73, turns the plaque into the sunlight to read the inscription.

The award from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recognizes Kuenzler's conservation work. A 16-acre man-made wetland on her property filters runoff entering Collins Creek. The creek is a tributary to the Haw River, which runs beneath her long, gravel driveway off Old Greensboro Road.

Kuenzler has attached a thin metal strip to the bottom of the plaque to add a name missing from the original inscription, which honored only her.

Her late husband, Edward, an ecologist, started the wetland project but died before it was finished.

In late 2001 volunteers planted more than two dozen species of trees and shrubs he had selected from nearby Niche Gardens to seed the bottomland forest, which surrounds the nine wetland pools. That December, Jutta completed another of the couple's dreams when she signed a conservation easement with the Triangle Land Conservancy. The agreement preserves their land as the natural place where Edward recorded 90 species of birds and animals and 300 species of plants.

In 2003, then U.S. Secretary of the Interior Gayle Norton visited Kuenzler's home to thank her.

"The plaque was given just to me," Kuenzler said. "I thought no. I put [Edward's] name. I put that on top."

She is not thinking "too much right now" about the possibility of losing her land to an airport. She says she hopes the conservation easement would keep that from happening, though she doesn't know.

"At first I thought couldn't be, couldn't be."

She looks out the big picture window, past a small pond and the bird feeder where she watches cardinals, chickadees and juncos, small sparrows she calls snowbirds. On the pond she sometimes sees a young heron.

"Their argument is the doctors are closer if an airport is built in Orange County," she says.

"Ten minutes further to RDU is not much closer. That's no argument ... no argument to me."

Billie and Warren Ray, Orange Chapel Clover Garden Road

From Billie and Warren Ray's dining room window, you can see the cattle grazing behind their house on Orange Chapel Clover Garden Road.

Warren, 73 and retired from UNC, has 36 brood cows and 18 calves on the couple's 125 acres. He keeps the cattle to get the tax break the county gives farmland -- "the only way you can afford to have land in Orange County."

A muzzle loader hangs over the fireplace, but before he's asked, Ray says it's not operable. He just likes it hanging there.

Once, all the surrounding land belonged to Billie's great-great-grandfather, James Morris. She descends from his son John Manley Morris, the fourth of nine children. She knows this because she has the records, which she spreads out on the farm kitchen table.

There in handwritten script like you'd see in a museum or Ken Burns documentary it says John Manley Morris enlisted in company F 33rd infantry on July 8, 1862. Three years later, on April 2, 1865, he was taken prisoner near Petersburg, Va.

He's buried at the Methodist church next door.

"When my people bought this land, money was tight," Billie said. "They worked and worked and worked to get it paid for, and it wasn't easy."

The Rays don't believe the university might want their land for its doctors. They do think there are rich people -- alumni, donors, business executives -- who want to fly their jets in, though Warren says he can't prove it.

The couple built their house in 1961 and planned to live in it until they died and passed it on. They don't want to think about losing it, no matter how much they might get compensated for it.

"I am satisfied living right here," Warren said. "My home is paid for. I don't owe anybody anything. I'm happy as I can be with my little farm."

He paused.

"You know, they don't make land anymore," he said. "Land is a precious thing. You got it, you hold onto it."