|
Her Paradise is Preserved
By ANNE PAINE
Developers should quit calling. Karen Guy's 147-acre Davidson County farm — with a mile of shoreline on Old Hickory Lake — can never be chopped up for subdivisions and new houses. The farmer has signed a permanent agreement with a conservation group in which she gave up millions of dollars in potential land-sale profits in exchange for peace of mind. Such an expanse of history-laced land, farmed for more than two centuries, is rare in Davidson County. So are instances where owners abandon development rights on a prized, urban-embedded parcel like this. "I was probably born 100 years too late," Guy said, standing in the shade of a massive elm once owned by Andrew and Rachel Jackson, from whose adopted son she's descended. "I don't like change. I don't like development. I'm so lucky I have the opportunity to be the one to save such a lovely piece of ground." With the Land Trust for Tennessee, she has signed a legally binding conservation agreement that protects the landscape of Hunter's Hill Farm. In return, Guy gets a tax deduction — the amount to be figured on her income next year. A federal law expiring at the end of the year will give her a larger tax write-off than she would get next year. "She is a hero to all of us who seek to preserve our state's historic and scenic landscapes and working farms," said Jean C. Nelson, president and executive director of The Land Trust. Hunter's Hill is the second significant Davidson County preservation project for the group in eight months, she said. The other was the pre-Civil War mansion Glen Leven, and 65 acres of Oak Hill land that was willed outright to the group. It's hard to lose a cow Guy spent early morning Tuesday on her farm dealing with a stillborn calf and the calf's mother, who may have been injured. Later, she greased a mower and cut a field. That was before she weeded her flower garden, where butterflies hovered around pink hollyhocks and bee balm. In between, she fretted over the lack of rain that could fry the fescue, orchard grass and clover needed for hay this fall. She also worried over her old 2,000-pound bull, which must be replaced. "He's got to be hamburger," she said in her restful country drawl. "He's got down in his back. He can't do his job with a bad back." The bull lay in a shed, chewing and looking out at her and her visitor. In another stall lay Agnes, who had the birthing trouble that morning. (She had to be put down on Thursday.) In a fenced area across the path hobbled a 20-year-old Hereford named Joyce, the result of Guy's soft heart. "That's bad business," she said. A farmer can make $100 selling no-longer-productive livestock or else end up paying what amounts to the same later in a "backhoe burial." All the stock sired are bound for sale as meat. But Guy, despite a UT degree in animal sciences and years of farming, has a difficult time with it. "She cries when we sell them," said J.D. Pierce, farm caretaker. No typical farmer with her blond ponytail and bangs, Guy, 50, worked for the state Agriculture Department for 18 years, dealing mainly with regulating pesticide use. Now she wants to live out her days working the land for cattle and riding her horse, not wondering whether houses and strip malls will cover the land when she's gone. Farm is part of childhood As a youngster, Guy would visit her great-uncle and great-aunt, Aubrey and Louise Maxwell, who then owned the farm. She rode ponies and swam at a dock built when the area was flooded for Old Hickory Lake, which took 50 acres of their property. The dock lies today across a small inlet from houses in the Brandywine Pointe subdivision, some worth more than $1.6 million. "To me they're hideous, but each to their own," she said, glancing at one of the posh structures with multiple levels and masses of windows.After her great-uncle's death, she helped "Lou" with the farming. Her great-aunt, childless, named her as the heir to the property when she died. Her scratched-out income from cattle is supplemented by fees from a cellular telephone tower in one field. That's enough, she said. With its colorful sugar maples in fall and birds and beasts year-round, she prefers the land to mega-wealth.
Jacksons owned the land Hunter's Hill Farm was part of 640 acres that Andrew Jackson bought in 1796, before he became president. He and his wife, Rachel, lived there for several years before they built their first home, an earlier version of The Hermitage that later burned. Jackson ran a mercantile store there, too. The Hermitage, where Guy helps cut hay and was head gardener for three years, is across the road. The Jacksons never had biological children but adopted a nephew of Rachel's, from whom Guy is descended. A chinkapin oak at her gate has witnessed the comings and goings of many generations of farmers, and Guy would like to keep it that way. She had been losing sleep over what might happen when she's gone, but she is no longer. She can still sell the land or give it away. While it won't necessarily be farmed, the deed requires it stay green. Only one new house could be built, and that would be to replace an old tenement house that's in disrepair. "People need to see 10, 20, 30 years from now what it used to be like," she said. "Thank goodness something like The Land Trust is in place so this place can be saved."
|
