Farmer donates land to save heritage, property

By Joel Davis
of The Daily Times Staff

Laverne Farmer is fighting time.

The 76-year-old Townsend resident wants her 185-year-old farm to be preserved long after she’s gone.

“It’s been a farm ever since the settlers came in here,” she said. “The Indians were around when they came. It’s been in my family all these years. I just don’t want to see it messed up with development. I don’t have any family (left). I figured as soon as I was gone, there would be somebody in here plowing it up for building houses. I don’t want that.”

So, Farmer is taking steps. She’s donated a conservation easement to the Foothills Land Conservancy, signing away the development rights for the 210-acre property, a prime commercial location fronting East Lamar Alexander Parkway (U.S. 321).
“I hope this is a way that I can keep it as a farm,” she said.

Standing in the parking lot of Bethel Baptist Church in Townsend on Thursday, Bill Clabough looked out over the adjoining Farmer property, silently absorbing the view of fog-shrouded pasture and forested slopes.

“It’s neat to think that this will never change ” Clabough said.

Clabough, executive director of the Foothills Land Conservancy based in Maryville, said this is just one of 11 conservation easements in Blount County that the FLC is in the process of securing before the end of the year.

Although Farmer reserved the right to remodel and expand the two existing houses on the tract, she wants to preserve the rest of the farm in its current condition.

“Basically, the rest of it will stay exactly like it is forever,” Clabough said.

A conservation easement is a transfer of usage rights that restricts development on a property. As 2007 winds to a close, the conservancy is securing 25 conservation easements, 11 in Blount County alone, that will protect 4,000 acres in all. It’s been an intensive process, Clabough said.

“It usually takes about three or four months to get one of these conservation easements done, once the property owner says ‘yes,’” he said.

The property runs from the highway back all the way to the border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“Her great, great-grandfather John Myers actually settled the property about 185 years ago,” Clabough said. “They have farmed it ever since. In 15 years, it will have been (used for) two centuries as an actively working farm.”

Maintaining the property as a farm will benefit the community in years to come.
“Can you imagine a 200-acre working farm here, 100 years from now?” Clabough said. “Can you imagine how many kids will not even know what a cow is in 100 years?”

The FLC is a private, nonprofit organization that operates as a land trust. Clabough, a former Tennessee state senator, became director of the conservancy in April 2006.