Wednesday, April 30, 2003
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Wednesday, April 30, 2003 |
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Decision to sell Rivers Farm marks end of era By J. FRANK LYNCH
It is a near-perfect spring afternoon down on the farm, and the beetles are buzzing. Fields mint green with the flavor of young hay stretch as far as the eye can see, framed only by the darker hues of evergreens and pines lining the far horizon. Piercing an otherwise spotless blue sky is the occasional cellphone tower, an airplane on approach to Hartsfield and the rust-shaded peak of Fayette Community Hospital, the county's tallest building, about a mile south. Cars zip down Sandy Creek Road, off Ga. Highway 54 in the center of the county, at a steady pace, but the traffic is not overwhelming. Paul Rivers, who has lived along this road for all of his 31 years, acknowledges most of them with a glance. A few get waves. He doesn't know where they are going, and he doesn't care. "I'm the only thing standing between Fayetteville and Peachtree City," declares Rivers, a fourth-generation Fayette Countian and a one-man link between the county's past and its inevitable future. Rivers has spent most of the day standing and watching a pile of rubble burn, slowly. It is all that remains of an old sharecropper's house that sat on this corner of Sandy Creek and Hood roads for generations. A black family lived there until recently, faithful tenants who refused offers by the Rivers family to improve the house. When Rivers finally knocked it over with a front-loader recently, all that was left standing was the outhouse, painted a stylish gray. Rundown farm houses used to line Sandy Creek Road, once the epicenter of an agricultural empire. Two or three weathered cabins still stand around the bend, reminders of a time when Fayette County was known by outsiders for its isolation and poverty, not its fine schools and golf courses. This rural, some say bucolic, holdout to the area's past is about to change big, and how it changes could have far-reaching consequences for years to come. Surely it will bring hundreds of homes, thousands more people, offices and stores, maybe high-tech industry, more cars and more classrooms. Within a year, the quiet, peaceful solitude of a spring afternoon on one of Fayette County's last farms could be gone forever, replaced by the churn and din of construction crews carving streets and raising up new houses. That prospect might anger slow-growth advocates, but it fills Paul Rivers with glee. * * * To understand what Fayette County is today is to understand what it once was or rather, what it was not. Through much of the last decade, it was considered a muddy, dirt-poor, mostly worthless backwater, cut off from Atlanta by a highway system that favored Coweta to the west and Clayton to the east. Paved roads were not widespread until the 1950s. The population countywide was barely 8,000 when a group of young dreamers founded Peachtree City in 1959. The Rivers family has been in the area for more than 100 years. Paul Rivers' great-grandfather, who was sheriff in the 1920s, began building the family's empire, a few acres at a time. Back then, land was cheap, especially Fayette County land. Eventually, the holdings would total more than 3,100 acres, stretching from Westbridge Road in the north end of the county, down Gingercake Creek Road, along Graves and Tillman roads and eventually down Sandy Creek Road to Hwy. 54. As each generation came and went, the drive to keep the family beef cattle farm going remained strong, even as Fayette County went from sub-rural to metropolitan. Paul Rivers would be the end of the line, the last of a generation. A family tragedy hastened the decision. "Nine, nine, ninety-nine," Paul Rivers responds when asked for the date his father died. Charles Rivers was "a farmer's farmer" and, by all accounts from those who knew him, one of the finest men you'd meet. He was traveling south on Ga. Highway 92 on Sept. 9, 1999, when a car pulled out in front of him from Lowery Road in the Griggsville Community. He was killed instantly. After the initial grief and shock subsided and reality set in, Paul realized that it was up to him to run the farm. He gave it four years. "I do not farm because it is fun," he says. "I farm to make money." "Everybody thinks farming is something in the fairy tale books, and everybody just comes around and looks at the chicky and the horse and the pig and the cow." Instead, he says, it is sunup to sundown on those days he's not working his main job, the one that draws a regular check and benefits, in the Delta maintenance hangar. He was hit hard by drought the first three years, socked by too much rain last year. "See that field over there," he says, pointing to acres of tall green grass, beaten down by heavy rain. "That rainstorm cost me about $1,500." To his credit, he tried. He went to Athens to take classes at the University of Georgia agriculture school, drove to South Georgia to see how the big operations make a profit, went on the Internet to research business plans. The most profit he made in any given year was about $5,000, he said. Last year, more than 350 head of cattle were sold off. The equipment was carted off or stored away. The fields are growing hay this season, the only crop that might turn a profit, he says. Paul's mother, retired school teacher Barbara Rivers, moved to Lamar County where she is raising horses. Next year, Paul and his wife Amy and newborn son, Charles Garrett, will have joined her. The Rivers Farm is closed. *** A Limited Trust Partnership made up of immediate family members still holds about 750 acres of rolling, manicured pastureland, believed to be the largest private single-owner tract of land in the county. Or, put another way, that's 750 acres of prime, undeveloped real estate dead center between Fayetteville, Peachtree City and Tyrone. Fayette Community Hospital is a neighbor. The Fayette County Board of Education purchased 60 acres nearby last July for a high school, so sure are they of the impending invasion of newcomers. From the smoldering remains of the old tenant shack it is less than five miles to the square in Fayetteville, about the same to the heart of Peachtree City, eight miles to I-85 at Ga. Highway 74 and less than 30 minutes to Turner Field. Location, clearly, has a price. Some say the land is worth as much as $25 million. But the Rivers Farm is not for sale, officially. You won't find it listed in real estate guides or on the Internet. With a sly grin, Paul Rivers admits there are suitors, lots of them. Offers come in nearly every day, and the family has listened to some of them. But there are issues surrounding the partnership that prevent a sale until the end of this year, Rivers said. With the acreage coming off a 10-year conservation tax abatement status this year, a hefty tax bill will be due in the fall, tens of thousands of dollars. Clearly, selling is in the best financial interest of the family. And when it sells, Paul Rivers says, it will go to the highest offer. "I don't care if you put a nuclear waste dump here," he says, joking. "I want the most money for my land." If he seems a little bitter, there's a reason: Fayette County, he says, is not the place he grew up. Newcomers move here saying they appreciate the rural lifestyle, the charm of the farm. "These same people honk and cuss and throw things at me when I'm on the tractor driving down the road," he says. "The police have even pulled me over and told me I shouldn't be driving down the road, that it wasn't safe. It's a farm!" Rivers said his land has been trespassed countless times, and used as a dumping ground. "People think it's a park, that they can just come out here and do as they please." The Rivers family knew all along that this day would come, eventually. If his father were still alive, Paul Rivers said, it likely wouldn't be coming so soon. "He had farming in him, it was natural," he said. "He always had to be on the tractor." But he also saw it coming, the younger Rivers admits. His dad knew the traffic along Sandy Creek was growing busier, and he answered the phone and the door when developers and prospectors and real estate agents came calling. What becomes of the hundreds of acres, and hundreds more adjacent to it owned by other families, is anybody's guess. It is currently zoned either AR (in county zoning terminology that means agricultural-residential), which requires five-acre-minimum lots, or R-70, two-acre minimums. Nobody expects it to remain that way. While Rivers will not say, common sense would suggest whoever buys the land will ask for annexation into the city of Fayetteville, which abuts the property at Fayette Community Hospital. And that will allow for city sewer hookups. And that will allow for hundreds more houses than could possibly be built in the area now. By then, the Rivers family will have moved on. Paul Rivers says he'll try to farm again in Lamar County, where land is cheap, as if that matters at this point. He apologizes, almost, for quitting and abandoning the homeplace. "Do you blame me?" he says. And then, "Nobody in their right mind would want to be a farmer for a living."
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