The Boulder County commissioners on Tuesday will consider spending $458,000 to buy about 51 acres of onetime farm land in the Gold Hill area to preserve it as open space.

The Gold Hill Town Council has urged the county to purchase the property at 1270 Dixon Road from its current private owners, the Schmidt Family Trust, citing its importance to the community.

The gently sloping property is adjacent to U.S. Bureau of Land Management land to its east, single-family homes on its south and includes a large meadow on its northeast portion, according to Sandy Duff, a land officer in the county’s Parks and Open Space Department.

Gold Hill Town Council Chairman Peter Swift said the parcel has been “used by generations of Gold Hill children of all ages for sledding and snowboarding in winter and various other activities in summer.” He noted it was used for agriculture in the early 1900s, “with furrows of an old potato field still clearly visible in the spring before the grass begins to grow there.”

The land is “the only piece of undeveloped property between the historic town site and its pioneer cemetery,” with “a popular footpath from Hill Street in Gold Hill to the cemetery,” Swift wrote Duff.

Swift said the Schmidt property’s meadow borders meadowland deeded to the town by President Grover Cleveland in 1896 and that the town’s and Schmidt Trust properties together “serve as a buffer between the historic town site and the modern development to the south along Dixon Road.”

Duff and the Town Council said it appears that the Schmidt property includes about one acre of the cemetery itself, which Duff said the county would probably deed to the town if Boulder County acquires the property.

She said the property has one development right associated with it, which the county would eliminate if it proceeds with the purchase. Duff said a residence once situated there was destroyed by the 2010 Fourmile Canyon Fire, “along with many of the trees in the center of the property.”

County acquisition of the 51 acres “will help to preserve and protect the agricultural history of the Gold Hill area, as well as the cemetery near the southeast portion of the property,” Duff wrote the Board of County Commissioners, “while protecting scenic and wildlife values.”

Boulder County’s Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee voted Sept. 24 to support the proposed purchase, which the commissioners are to consider at an 11 a.m. hearing in the third-floor meeting room of the Boulder County Courthouse, 1325 Pearl St., Boulder.

John Fryar: 303-684-5211, jfryar@times-call.com or twitter.com/jfryartc