The Sussex County Land Trust purchased 80-acres of farmland for $8.5 million in the Lewes area that has seen tremendous growth in housing and business development. In our partnership with Spotlight Delaware Delmarva Public Media's Don Rush talked with reporter Olivia Marble about the implications of purchase. The full interview can be heard on Delmarva Today at our website delmarvapublicmeida.org.
RUSH: The cost was $8.5 million. That's the purchase price for the Sussex County Land Trust and its effort to preserve a patch of farmland amidst the rapidly growing development in Sussex County. This is Don Rush. The 80-acre farm is located near Lewes, and the owner, Linda Miller, says she did not want to simply sell it off to developers for more housing. Our partnership with Spotlight Delaware, we talked with reporter Olivia Marble about what she found.
MARBLE: So it's an 80-acre property that has a farm on it and also a little wetlands area as well. And the plan is to preserve the farm as some sort of agricultural use. Right now it's a corn and soybean field, and then also to build a trail around it that there will be public access, but it will take longer for that to happen and even more money than it took to acquire this property.
RUSH: The owner of it was Linda Miller. Tell me a little bit about her and how she came to sell off the land.
MARBLE: Yeah, so this land has been in her family for a couple generations. I believe it was her aunt and uncle who first bought it. Her family's been farmers for I believe, four generations, and she decided to sell the land to the Sussex County Land Trust, which is a nonprofit dedicated to preserving land for a lot less than she would have gotten if she sold it to a housing developer, for example, because she said she just loved the land as it was, and that she wouldn't have been able to find peace within herself if she sold it to a housing developer. Her family calls it [?] which is Irish Gaelic for "the rise that catches the sun" because it has a slight slope and it has views of beautiful sunsets. So she really loves this property and wants the public to enjoy it for years to come.
RUSH: So I assume you've been out there. What is it like to be out there?
MARBLE: Yeah, I have been out there, and so right now most of the property is a cornfield, or right now it's the cut cornfield. I don't know if new things have been planted yet or not. And yeah, it's very peaceful. It's on the east side of Route One, but it's far enough away so that you don't hear the cars passing. It's pretty secluded from nearby homes. I wrote in my article that it's a quiet scene set within one of the region's fastest growing areas. It was kind of hard to believe. It basically was one of the fastest growing areas in Delaware because it was just so peaceful.
RUSH: In terms of the history of this. I understand that former county councilman I.G. Burton, I guess was the first to start looking at this back in 2019, but then it took a lot of money. So where did the funding come from for all of this?
MARBLE: Sussex County does not have a parks department, so they partner with a lot of different nonprofits to help pull together funds to acquire open space like this. And in this case, it was the Sussex County Land Trust, and that was all the way back in 2019 that they started to pull together this money. First there was the appraisal process, which took several years, and then they went to the US Department of Agriculture for some funding. They went to DNREC, the State's Environmental Agency, for another chunk of funding. The Sussex County Council gave, I think it was a little under $2 million, and then there was private donations and the Longwood Foundation donated. So it was a lot of effort to pull together all of this money.
RUSH: Spotlight Delaware Reporter, Olivia Marble on the Land Trust purchase of property near Lewes to preserve 80 acres of farmland. The full interview can be heard on Delmarva Today on our website at delmarvapublicmedia.org. This is Don Rush for Delmarva Public Media.
