The County Tried to Take My Family’s Pecan Orchard for a Developer’s Shopping Center. They Didn’t Count on a Box of 1923 Papers

Eminent domain is the government’s right to take private land for public use, as long as it pays “fair market value.” Roads. Schools. Hospitals.

I didn’t understand how a shopping center was public use.

Then I found out who was building it.

The developer was a company called Southland Commercial Partners. The company’s managing partner was married to the sister of the county commissioner who’d pushed the project through.

The county’s appraisal offered me eight hundred thousand dollars for land that had been in my family for a hundred years. An independent appraiser I hired valued it at almost twice that, just for the land, not counting the orchard.

I hired a lawyer in Albany. He was honest with me.

“Thad, Georgia changed its eminent domain law after a Supreme Court case in 2005. It’s harder for counties to take land for private developers now. But they’re calling this ‘blight removal’ and ‘economic development.’ And the commission has a lot of friends. I’ll fight. But I can’t promise anything.”

The hearing was set for September.

I went home and sat on the porch in the dark for a long time.

Marcus came out and sat next to me.

“Granddad,” he said. “What did great-great-granddaddy Josiah do with his papers?”

“What papers?”

“When he bought the land,” Marcus said. “People kept everything back then. Deeds. Letters. Maybe there’s something.”

I looked at him.

“The attic,” I said. “There’s a trunk in the attic nobody’s opened since 1970.”