Editorial: Purchase helps Hyde preservation push

An editorial from the Marietta Daily Journal on Thursday, December 11, 2008

The Hyde Farm overlooking the Chattahoochee River is a pristine slice of Cobb as it was 50, or 100, or 150 years ago - a last island of green space in what now is heavily developed east Cobb.

The farm has been worked continuously from the 1830s. Longtime owner J.C. Hyde plowed its fields with a mule almost up until his death in 2004, and it still includes an original log cabin and various outbuildings and barns.

Hyde sold part of the farm for tax reasons in the 1990s to become part of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, and after his death the Trust for Public Land announced the purchase of the 95-acre remainder. That portion ultimately is to be divided and sold to the National Park Service and Cobb County. Some $5 million from the 2006 county parks bond approved by voters has been earmarked for that purchase.

The plan all along has been to keep the Hyde Farm as intact as possible and use it as a museum of sorts for school children and the public to give them an idea of what life was like here in decades long past. But the aim of keeping it pristine is in obvious conflict with the necessity of providing parking, restrooms and interpretive/administrative space.

Hence, the county commission's vote on Tuesday to approve the purchase of two adjoining tracts. The first is a 12.9-acre tract (including a two-acre lake) owned by the Dolvin family, purchased for $1.35 million, or about $104,600 per acre. The second is a 4.5-acre tract owned by the Walker family, which the county bought for $900,000, or the $199,000 per acre.

Money for those purchases also came from the $40 million parks bond passed in 2006.

"We didn't want to put any parking associated with the Hyde Farm on (the Hyde Farm) property," explained Commission Chairman Sam Olens of the purchases.

Also on the Dolvin property, in addition to the lake, is a 16,000-square-foot house that can be used as a welcome center for the farm.

In short, the two purchases of adjoining property will do nothing but enhance the experience for the generations of visitors and schoolchildren expected to come to the farm in years to come. The wise use of the parks bond money in this instance is in keeping with the county's careful spending of it thus far, which was a big reason why Cobb voters passed a second $40 million parks bond in November. And such decisions also help lay the groundwork for a third such bond a few years from now, should one be deemed necessary.