Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012

Holly Springs set to buy $1M farm

Land belonged to pioneering Cary developer

This town may add a sprawling farm to its stable of parks.

Local leaders agreed last week to pay about $1 million for a 117-acre rural stretch that borders Bass Lake Park. The purchase, to be completed later this year, would double the acreage of the park.

The land is the former home of the late Jefferson Sugg, a Johnston County native who was among the first developers to find Cary in the 1950s.

Sugg bought the Holly Springs land in 1987 to escape Cary’s hustle and bustle – which he’d helped create by building subdivisions and a shopping center, his family said.

“He was a big horseman, so he was looking for something and found it in Holly Springs, which was the middle of nowhere,” said his daughter, Jeanne Doty, 61.

Holly Springs plans to use the Sugg farm as a park, in line with the late developer’s wishes. Before his death, Sugg partnered with the Triangle Land Conservancy to restrict development on the land, his family said.

“Everything had been developed around it, and he just wanted one piece, that he owned, not to ever be developed – that people could forever and ever see the land, like it was when he bought it,” Doty said.

The legal restrictions on the land would forbid its use for athletics fields. Instead, the town could host more-relaxed recreation in the two houses and their barns, which sit at the end of Grigsby Avenue.

“The general ... thought is to go through the same sort of master-planning process,” said Town Attorney John Schifano.

The property will be easy to link to the town’s greenway network, he said, and shares a long border with the existing Bass Lake Park. The town has agreed to name the area Jefferson L. Sugg Park.

To obtain the property, the town’s management negotiated the family’s trust from a $2.5 million asking price to the million-dollar selling price, Schifano said.

The family is happy to see the land preserved, Doty said.

And the town’s leadership, according to Mayor Dick Sears, sees nothing but good things coming.

“When everybody sees it, when it’s done, you’ll be very, very, very proud the town had the forward vision,” he said, “to buy this at a vey, very good price.”