Fifteen days after Ford Motor Co.’s big reveal, the mayors of Haywood County and Stanton rendezvoused with a reporter and photographer at the Megasite of West Tennessee.

Haywood County Mayor David Livingston unlocked the county’s empty fire station built two years ago to serve whatever industry would locate in the 4,200-acre industrial park.

But before Livingston and Stanton Mayor Allan Sterbinsky could sit for an interview, Livington’s cell phone rang.

A Dallas-based developer was calling.

“The company wants to put a housing project here and it is probably going to be in Brownsville,” Livingston would say later. “But they also want to put a hotel here. They will have more than one project.”

Three more times during an hourlong interview, another developer, a construction company and a businessman would call or even physically track down Livingston. They asked either about available property to buy in Haywood County or for contact information for the people who will be building the $5.6 billion, 3,600-acre industrial campus Ford has dubbed “Blue Oval City.”

The county and world learned on Sept. 28 that Ford plans to build by 2025 a futuristic auto-manufacturing complex where 6,000 people will work. Ford will make F-Series, electric pickup trucks and, in a joint venture with South Korea’s SK Innovation, vehicle batteries.

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The news unleashed a level of interest by developers that would flood Haywood County’s pristine Hatchie River.

This land-rich county of fewer than 18,000 residents will need more housing, more restaurants, more gas stations, more stores, more of everything.

Haywood County property owners also need some time, appraisals and some more guinea pig property sales to figure out the new normal.

What’s the value of land, houses and commercial buildings now? 

Phones are ringing.

Strangers in dark SUVs with tinted windows are cruising around for opportunities.

Livingston finished the first call and arranged folding chairs in a small office of Fire Station No. 11. But before he took a seat, Livingston noticed through the front window a visitor in the parking lot get out of a pickup bearing the logo of a Jackson heavy-equipment dealership.

Stepping outside to investigate, Livingston learned the man had tracked him down thanks to a tip from the mayor’s office in Brownsville 17 miles away.

The visitor sought the mayor’s insight: How could he contact the people in charge of building Blue Oval City so he could offer to rent them his bulldozers and track hoes?

“I told him that to my knowledge a general contractor has not been picked yet,” Livingston said.

The same heavy-equipment retailer was at Stanton Town Hall the day before, Sterbinsky said, adding, “He was in my office asking the same question.”

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The hourlong interview finally started, and just before it ended, Livingston’s phone beeped yet again.

“Hello. This is he. Yes, sir,” the county mayor said as he rose from his chair, moved to another of the fire station’s empty rooms and carried on an extended conversation.

“Construction company,” Livingston later explained after putting his cell phone away. “They wanted as much information about the site as they could get: Who will be the general contractor? The timeframe to turn dirt? They wanted to know the relationship of SK Innovation and Ford.

“I’m not privy to that,” said Livingston, a former trial attorney. “Look, I’m a small-town mayor, OK? I have met (Ford executive chair) Bill Ford. But I don’t know Bill Ford. I don’t have his cell number. And I promise you I don’t know the details.”

Besides Brownsville, Stanton is Haywood County’s only incorporated town and sits about four miles north of the Megasite.

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The incoming calls since the Ford announcement have been back to back, Sterbinsky said.

“All day long. They are saying things like, ‘OK, I’m interested in about a 1,000-acre subdivision. Where can I get the land? How much do they want for it?’ ”

Sterbinsky has noticed something else.

“We got fancy cars with dark windows crawling all over Stanton,” he said. “They show up out of nowhere. Some of them with stop at Town Hall and talk with me. But they are all over, everywhere, cruising the area.

“It’s exciting,” he said.

Post-announcement sales

Before the Ford announcement, the Haywood County farmland typically fetched $3,000 to $3,500 per acre.

That’s according to Steve Smith, who since 1994 has recorded all the county’s property sales in his duties as Haywood Counter register of deeds.

But his office listed an atypical sale in its books on Oct. 21. A few local businessmen and Nashville resident, who are not developers, bought 44 acres of farmland from local farmers for $440,000, or $10,000 an acre, records show.

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The property happens to abut Dancyville Road and Interstate 40 at Exit 47, which is less than seven miles northeast of the Megasite of West Tennessee.

“It’s just my opinion; I have no concrete facts these folks are speculating, but I think they are,” Smith said. 

A sale with potentially even more impact occurred inside Brownsville and also after plans for Blue Oval City was revealed.

A Florida entity purchased for $3.2 million the long-vacant manufacturing building at 2000 Tamm, which last housed the American Air Filter.

Public records reveal nothing about the intentions for the empty plant, showing only that the new owner — TAMM 2000 LLC — has a Boca Raton address.

“I don’t know if they’re affiliated with the (future) supply network at the mega-site, but all of a sudden — bam — there it is,” Smith said of the industrial property’s sale.

The closing of American Air Filter killed hundreds of jobs and hurt the community, Smith said, adding, “Brownsville would benefit first-hand from a supplier sitting out here at the American Air Filter building.”

On the map

Sometimes the best way to explain something is to draw it.

So Sterbinsky, the Stanton mayor, commandeered a reporter’s legal pad, and drew:

A tiny circle representing Stanton to the north, or atop the page;

A diagonal line showing Interstate 40 about five miles to the south, toward the bottom of the page;

Between Stanton and I-40, a big box symbolizing the Megasite of West Tennessee and Ford Motor Co.’s future “Blue Oval City;”

A vertical line representing Tenn. 222 directly connecting Stanton to the campus that will make the Ford Lightning pickups and batteries; 

To the east of Blue Oval City, a diagonal line representing Tenn. 179 (Stanton Koko Road), which with Dancyville Road connects Stanton to another I-40 interchange at Exit 47.

“We’ve got water and sewer here,” Sterbinsky said, moving his pen along Tenn. 179.

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“This is where the hotels, Kroger, Home Depot — that kind of stuff — will go,” he said, pointing to I-40’s Exit 47.

The mayor again traced his pen along Tenn. 179, saying, “This will be a winding rural pathway, and on the back will be subdivisions on either side.” His plan preserves much of the tree canopy that shades and beautifies the rural, two-lane highway.

Then Sterbinsky pointed his pen to a two- or three-mile segment of Tenn. 222 that directly links Stanton to Blue Oval City.

“This will look like Germantown Road” in Cordova, he said. “This is where all the commercial things are going to go. There will be retail there. We’ve already put in plans for a potential school here and sheriff’s substation there.”

That segment of Tenn. 222 will be Stanton’s front door, and make the first impression, Sterbinsky said. So safety and education — schools and sheriff’s substation — will speak volumes about the town, the mayor indicated.

Stanton comprises only 322 acres, but wields influence over plans for another 10,000 acres within its future growth zone that extends southeast beyond I-40.

Sterbinksy’s overarching idea is to preserve the small-town atmosphere within the old core of Stanton.

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The tiny town’s low- and moderate-income housing co-exists with beautiful, white clapboard homes historic enough that their names are displayed on signs posted in the front yards.

Sterbinsky plans to develop more walking/biking trails there and encourage artists to move to Stanton and be in spaces where they can live upstairs but work and display their art downstairs.

His template is Collierville. That town has preserved its small-town charm and Town Square in the core, but expanded outward with vast suburban residential and commercial development.

But Stanton’s strategic plan is not geared to appeal to the household incomes of Collierville, where the average sales price of a house in September was $448,402.

The mayor took the reporter’s pad to draw yet another illustration.

‘These are my people’

He drew a large triangle, divided it into four layers, and called it the “income triangle.”

The people at the top head large business, make $1 million or so in income, and “can live anywhere,” Sterbinsky said.

The next layer down represents those with $250,000 to $500,000 incomes. “They also can live anywhere,” he said.

The households involved with Blue Oval City and with $150,000 to $250,000 incomes “will probably live in Brownsville or Jackson or Memphis,” Sterbinsky said.

“But these people down here making $50,000 to $120,000 a year,” he said, pointing at the bottom of his triangle, “those are my people. Those are the ones who will come in and buy these houses.

“There’s a lot more of them,” he said. “… They are the target I’m after. They want to live close. Want to ride a bike to work. They want the amenities. They are attracted to small towns.”

‘I couldn’t tell you’

Secrecy was critically important between the time that Ford revealed its site-selection decision to state officials over the summer and the Sept. 28 announcement. 

Economic development executives tell war stories of corporations choosing a site but changing their minds because nothing more than a project code name was leaked. 

Livingston, the Haywood County mayor, knew about Blue Oval City before others in the county. So, he said he could only observe in silence when a close friend from his church sold 50 acres at $3,800 per acre just before Ford announced its plans.

Now the same acreage is probably worth $10,000 to $15,000 per acre, Livingston said.

“I walked over to him” almost apologetically at church, Livingston recalled of the Sunday after the Sept. 28 announcement. “I told him, ‘I couldn’t tell you’.”

Livingston said he has cousins who recently sold acreage just across the Tipton County line and near the Megasite. “If they had known the information, the price would have been twice what they sold it for,” Livingston said. “I had to call them Sunday and apologize to them. ‘I’ve known it for awhile and I just couldn’t tell you’,” he recalled telling his relative.

‘Lucky’ land buyer

Mohamed Saleh owns one convenience store with gas on Raleigh-Millington Road in Memphis’ Raleigh community. Ten months ago, he considered buying a second when he drove to Jackson to look at a convenience store for sale there.

Turns out, the Jackson property didn’t tempt Saleh. But on his drive to and from Jackson that day he did notice an undeveloped lot on the northeast corner at the interchange of I-40 and Tenn. 222.

He wound up buying that wooded, 4.6 acres for $300,000.

Saleh had no immediate plans to build there, saying, “I bought it for the future. Sometimes you got to bet. I thought, ‘Let me try my luck’.”

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Saleh was aware of the state’s nearby industrial Megasite, but figured more years would go by before it attracted a substantial employer.

He was working on Sept. 28 when a friend called.

“ ‘You watching the news?’ ” the friend asked.

“Why, what’s up?”

“ ‘Put on the news,’ “ the friend implored. “ ‘Ford Motor Co. is coming. Right across the street from your land’.

“I got on Twitter. I’m thinking, ‘That thing is real.’ I got excited.”

Within two weeks of the Blue Oval City announcement, Saleh hired a crew to start clearing the property.

He plans to build an 8,000- to 10,000-square-foot center with fuel for both cars and 18-wheelers but also space for chains like Burger King, Dunkin Donuts and Baskin-Robbins.

Saleh noticed the same thing that at least one journalist has seen: The small Pilot Travel Center on the opposite, south side of the I-40 interchange with Tenn. 222 seems to always be hopping with business.

“Anytime you go to the Pilot, it doesn’t matter what time, it’s always packed,” he said. “Imagine, Ford is coming to town with 5,800 people and other companies are coming in. No way they can go to Pilot; it’s already packed.”

He’s already received a $1.35 million offer for the property. Saleh says he’s not selling.

“I tell them it’s not for sale,” Saleh said, adding that he’s investing in a future in which he envisions his son eventually taking over the business.

Is anybody selling?

Since nothing of Blue Oval City’s scale has occurred in Haywood County — or West Tennessee for that matter — uncertainty exists over how to price property that is suddenly in great demand.

“The farmers, as far as I know, are not selling at all,” said Ann W. Gardner, managing broker of Crye-Leike Real Estate Services in Brownsville.

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“They are holding out and waiting to see how high it will go,” she said.

“Everything around the Megasite is row crops. We are going to need some of those farmers to agree to sell,” Gardner said.

“A lot of farmers here do not want to sell. I think that will be a really big issue.”

Joey Conner 
Realtor

“The Megasite came and made them millionaires and they sold their family farms,” Gardner said of the state’s purchase of 4,200 acres a decade ago. “They are not real excited about doing that again now.”

Farmers have always been reluctant to sell their land, said Realtor Joey Conner, owner/broker of Conner Real Estate in Brownsville. “That’s something that’s not new. Our biggest thing is farming and cotton,” he said.

“A lot of farmers here do not want to sell. I think that will be a really big issue,” Conner said.

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Perhaps near the Megasite, “some people will throw enough money at them that they will….

“We are going to have to have more housing,” Conner said. “That’s not a question. The demand will be there for housing, for people to have somewhere to stay. From what I’m getting now the farmers are holding tight. That may change in a year or two.

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Over the past year, Brownsville has experienced the same shortage of houses for sale that drove up housing prices across the country.

The trend had started leveling off for a bit until the Ford announcement, which started a second surge in prices and demand, Gardner said.

“We suddenly went to several phone calls a day from investors,” she said of people looking to buy rental property.

“They are from all different states. One was from Canada. We are enjoying the phone calls. They are super nice people,” she said.

Having read about Blue Oval City on the internet, Gardner said, the investors have been telling her, “ ‘We just want to buy something.’…

“The problem is, there is nothing for sale. We are selling out on everything we have.”