Around 20 years ago, people from St. Louis began to discover rural Franklin County. It was an hour and some minutes away from the city, but the peace and quiet, relatively inexpensive land, clean air and scenic views were enough to attract the first pioneers. As computers made it easier to work from home, others joined them.

Eventually, there were two sets of people in rural Franklin County — the descendants of the old farm families and the new people. For the most part, they got along. But there was a sense among many of the new people that they would always be new people.

"Unless you're born and raised here, you're an outsider," said Dave Baylard, an attorney. He moved from St. Louis to Union in 1982, and then to the country in 1988.

When the new people talk about being outsiders, they're not suggesting that the insiders are unfriendly. Instead, they're suggesting that there are certain connections that bond the insiders, connections that might go back to the Old World.

"Thirty years ago, they still spoke German in the churches around here," said Dave Smith, a mining engineer who works in St. Peters but has lived in Franklin County since 1999.

All these perceived connections came to the fore recently when descendants of one of the old farm families decided to sell their 167-acre farm on Highway YY and Vedder Road to a quarry operator who wanted to turn the land into a rock quarry.

Many of the people living near the proposed quarry opposed the idea. Most of them were newcomers, relatively speaking, who had come to the area for its ambience.

"We don't want to live across the street from a rock quarry," said Don Graham. He is an engineer. He and his wife have lived on Vedder Road for 21 years.

The opponents of the quarry felt the connections of the insiders might work against them. For one thing, the quarry operator, James Barrett, and his wife, Mary Ann, are from old families.

"Both our families go back to the 1840s," Mary Ann said. "Our roots go deep. We would not want to spoil the land."

The Barretts already operate a quarry in New Haven. They say it is about played out. They also say that most of the people who live near that quarry will testify to the fact that the Barretts are good neighbors. Many signed a petition to that effect. It was presented to the Franklin County Zoning and Planning Commission at a meeting last month.

Marian Redhage, one of the family members who want to sell the farm, spoke at the meeting. She told the overflow crowd that the family farm was originally homesteaded in 1865. She talked about the children who grew up on that farm.

"They played and went to school with many of your children. They waved wholeheartedly at you as they passed you on gravel roads. And they looked after you, your family and your property, just as you looked after them."

She tried to reassure the quarry's opponents: "We have also done much research to make sure that you, our neighbors, would be safe from the amount of dust in the air, the sounds of blasting and the traffic on the roadways, by ensuring that there are agencies that will be watching and monitoring the quarry's operation."

The assurances were of little solace to the opponents. I met with a group of them shortly after the meeting. They talked about the merits of the quarry — or lack of same, as they saw it — but they also talked about relationships they barely understood. What will all the invisible connections mean?

By the way, this is not a story about sophisticates and bumpkins. Members of the old families are as sophisticated as the new people.

Kevin Kriete, for instance, is a structural engineer with a master's degree. His family goes back several generations in Franklin County. He is vice chairman of the planning commission, and a member of the three-person review board that met Friday morning to review the quarry proposal.

The board voted to recommend that the commission deny the quarry its conditional use permit.

Afterwards, I spoke with Scottie Eagan, the senior planner for Franklin County. She, too, comes from a family with a long history in the county. She has a master's degree in urban planning and real estate development. She laughed when I mentioned that the new people felt there were invisible connections. "There is some truth to that," she said.

She said the review board had based its decision on three things: road safety concerns, insufficient geological evidence that this was the best spot for a quarry, and concern that a quarry was not in harmony with the area.

The commission will consider the recommendation at its July 20 meeting. Mary Ann Barrett told me she and her husband are not sure what they will do if the commission follows the review board's recommendation.

"This is really just 10 or 12 families stopping this," she said.