Stowe real estate: $9.95 million asking price for huge forested parcel

Dan D'Ambrosio | Burlington Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption WATCH: $9.95 million Stowe property bird's eye view 766 acres on Brownsville Road in Stowe bordering the C.C. Putnam State Forest and the Worcester Mountains is up for sale for $9.95 million.

It's a stunning piece of property with an address in one of Vermont's most desirable towns: 766 acres on Brownsville Road in Stowe.

The land is laced with forests, meadows and beaver ponds. It butts up against more than 13,000 acres of the C.C. Putnam State Forest and the Worcester Mountains, which creates a fortress of near wilderness with abundant wildlife, including bears.

The price tag is stunning too: $9.95 million.

"This is extremely unique, this is rare," said Rich Gardner of RE/MAX North Professionals last week. "There's only going to be a couple of these in anybody's lifetime as a real estate agent."

Gardner, together with his partner, David Parsons, are representing the owners of the property, Nancy Hughes of Bardstown, Kentucky, and her three brothers, two of whom live in Georgia and one in Florida.

How did such a gigantic piece of property make it to 2018 in one piece in one of Vermont's highest priced real estate markets?

"It's a pretty romantic story actually," said David Parsons.

A first anniversary gift extraordinaire

Christopher Story, Hughes' uncle, was an oil company executive in New York at the time he bought the property in 1950. He had met her aunt, Genevieve Johnson, at the oil company, where she was a secretary.

Story was 21 years older and the marriage in 1949 was his second, but none of that mattered, according to Hughes.

"I think they were the love of each other's lives," Hughes said. "He used to bring her a gift of some sort every single day."

In 1950, on the first anniversary of their marriage, the gift was a whopper. A getaway from the hustle and bustle of New York in bucolic Stowe, Vermont,

Story's original land purchase was around 500 acres, Hughes said, and her aunt later added more adjacent properties to the original piece to reach a total of 766 acres, all of it purchased from local farmers.

"They were so busy in the city all the time, it was a way to retreat and have peace and quiet and enjoy nature," Hughes said. "They just loved it."

The next 60 years

Hughes and her family loved it too. She has fond memories from the age of 7 or 8 of the original little farmhouse that came with the property.

"I remember going up and staying there in the little house," Hughes said. "My grandmother was an avid gardener. She loved plants and animals."

Hughes, remembers picking raspberries from a large wild patch near the beaver ponds on the property and her grandmother making jams and jellies from the berries.

Later Hughes' aunt and uncle built a second, larger house just down the road from the original farmhouse, where her grandmother would commune with raccoons.

"My grandmother used to be on the back porch and have tins of bread and dog food," Hughes remembered. "Raccoons would come out of the woods in droves and bring their babies. We'd say 'Grannie that's so dangerous!' She'd say, 'Oh no, they love me.' They'd run up, eat their food and go back in the woods."

The memories made it difficult for Hughes and her brothers to put the land up for sale after inheriting it when her aunt died in 2011 at the age of 96. Christopher Story died in 1960, age 68.

The decision to sell was unanimous among the siblings. Paying the taxes and upkeep of the home had become burdensome, despite the fact that the land is in current use for forestry and is taxed at $13,442 annually.

"It's a thousand miles away, everybody is working and has their own careers," Hughes said. "We were hoping to leave it to our children at some point but they don't have the attachment that we did. It's just different for them."

Is it worth $9.95 million?

When asked how they arrived at the $9.95 million price tag for the property, Rich Gardner reaches down and picks up some loose grass in the expansive field that borders Brownsville Road and tosses it into the air.

"You have to look at what the potential could be," Gardner said. "Neighborhoods next to this have been turned into beautiful housing developments. We tried to come up with a reasonable factor to put a sticker on it, but how do you? It's such a huge piece."

The property is zoned rural residential with a minimum of five-acre lots, according to Stowe Town Manager Charles Safford. That's likely to put a minimum price of around $500,000 on the houses. Gardner and Parsons have the original house associated with the property under contract for just under $500,000.

Parsons explains that they have sold other properties of 70 to 100 acres of raw land for about $20,000 an acre. Applying a volume discount to this property, the agents came up with a price that works out to about $13,000 an acre.

McKee Macdonald of Coldwell Banker Carlson Real Estate calls the $9.95 million price "aggressive."

"I don't agree with $20,000 an acre in our market," Macdonald said. "When you look at this thing from a development standpoint, there are a number of unknowns. How much is developable? How much is wetland? How much is the state going to impact what you can do there?"

Macdonald points out that the average Act 250 review, the state law that governs development, normally takes a year, and for this property, which is anything but normal, he believes the review would take longer than a year. He puts development costs at $1 million to $2 million, just to get ready to build houses.

'A true slice of Vermont wilderness'

Macdonald is intimately familiar with the property, having mountain biked, hiked and snowshoed just about every inch of it during his middle school and high school years. He said there's an awesome trail network connecting the fields and forests that make up the property, and amazing views of both Elmore and Hunger mountains.

"I think the majority of people that use that land would love to see it remain natural," Macdonald said.

Hughes is aware that locals use the property as if it were public, and for the most part she has no problem with it, as long as people don't leave trash behind, or tear up the logging roads with off-road vehicles, both of which have happened.

Hughes said she has been approached by the Stowe Land Trust "several times" about conserving the property, but for now she's going to wait and see what happens with the current listing.

Kristin Sharpless, executive director of the land trust, declined to specifically discuss her organization's efforts regarding Hughes' property, but agreed that it presents a incredible opportunity, and that she would love to see it conserved.

So would Hughes, who has a small farm in Kentucky and says the thought of the Stowe property being subdivided "breaks my heart." McKee Macdonald points out, however, that the chances of the property remaining intact are slim.

"Land conservation and $10 million price tags don't usually go hand-in-hand," Macdonald said. "Especially in the state of Vermont."

Corrections/Clarifications: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of McKee Macdonald's first name.

Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanDambrosioVT.