The next step began with the 1964 presentation by J. O. Buck Buchanan to the N.C. Highway Commission Board. An interstate highway was to be built from the east to downtown Asheville to connect with the existing freeway. The best way to do this, it was concluded, was to blast an -wide passage through Beaucatcher Mountain. The Beaucatcher Mountain Defense Association, formed in the early 1970s, endorsed a tunnel, which would mean only about 5 percent of the mountain would be disturbed. In 1977, the North Carolina Department of Transportation selected Asheville Contracting Co. for the project. 3 million cubic feet of rock, including greywacke believed to be one billion years old, would have to be moved, and all of it could be used in the construction. The company had several connections to those responsible for the road plan: company president Baxter Taylor was a business partner of Ted Jordan, a highway board member and a member of the Chamber of Commerce Highway Committee; they founded Hyde Insurance Company, which sold $39.9 million in bonds to finance the plan. And Buchanan went on to work in public relations for Asheville Contracting. One of the Defense Association's arguments was the highway's proximity to Zealandia, the estate of Philip Henry, whose Tudor mansion was covered by the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. However, when the mansion was named to the National Register of Historic Places on March 14, 1977, the destruction of the mountain had started. The four-mile project was completed October 31, 1980.