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HAYWOOD COUNTY, Tenn. – One year after Ford Motor Company broke ground on its future $5.6 billion electric truck plant, signs of economic prosperity are popping up nearly everywhere in rural west Tennessee.
At Suga’s Diner in Stanton, Tenn. (pop. 400), several miles down the road from the construction site, a nearly empty display of fruit pies and a carpet freshly muddied by work boots mark the end of the new lunchtime rush.
In windows all around the nearby Brownsville town square, businesses have tacked up “Welcome Y’all!” signs with the blue Ford logo, including one at a local real estate firm next to a listing for 70 acres of vacant land near Ford’s new BlueOval City campus. The listing is on the market for $14.5 million – an exorbitant jump in value from $10,000-per-acre asking prices several years ago.
And at local planning and zoning commissions, lengthy agendas list approval requests for Bed and Breakfasts, retail districts, sports bars and gas stations. Meanwhile, there’s not a hotel room to be had within a 30-mile radius.
Marvin Sanderlin, a longtime local farmer with 400 acres, said he’d like to take advantage of the coming development, too.
But the state has taken him to court for 10 acres of his property. The land lies in the path of a planned roadway connecting the Ford plant to the interstate. The state’s offer? $37,500 — or $3,750 per acre.
“That’s unheard of,” Sanderlin said of the offer, which includes the purchase of two acres of farmland outright and compensation for another eight acres of his property that will become inaccessible with the new interchange.
“You can’t buy no land here for $3,500 an acre. You can’t buy a swamp here for $3,500” Sanderlin said. “I told them this is the biggest ripoff there is. They want your land, but they don’t want you to participate in the wealth.”
Sanderlin is not alone in his legal fight with the state in this largely rural African-American farming region, where land being acquired by the Tennessee Department of Transportation has been in some families for generations.

Rosa Whitmore will lose the house and land she has owned a house and land for 37 years is going to lose her home and land as the State of Tennessee takes it for the Ford Blue Oval plant. (Photo: John Partipilo)

A road named for Ray Jones’ grandfather will soon be closed. (Photo: John Partipilo)

A Brownsville-area farmer at a March community meeting to discuss plans by the state to take property by eminent domain. (Photo: John Partipilo)

Matthew Sanderlin. (PHoto: John Partipilo)

The mineral spring house and land which has been owned by the Ray Jones family since 1931 was taken the Tennessee Department of Transportation for a new road that is going to the new Blue Oval
Plant in West Tennessee. (Photo: John Partipilo)
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