It is a near-perfect spring

afternoon down on the farm, and the beetles are buzzing. Fields mint green

with the flavor of young hay stretch as far as the eye can see, framed

only by the darker hues of evergreens and pines lining the far horizon.

Piercing an otherwise spotless blue sky is the occasional cellphone tower,

an airplane on approach to Hartsfield and the rust-shaded peak of Fayette

Community Hospital, the county's tallest building, about a mile south.

Cars zip down Sandy Creek Road,

off Ga. Highway 54 in the center of the county, at a steady pace, but

the traffic is not overwhelming. Paul Rivers, who has lived along this

road for all of his 31 years, acknowledges most of them with a glance.

A few get waves. He doesn't know where they are going, and he doesn't

care.

"I'm the only thing standing

between Fayetteville and Peachtree City," declares Rivers, a fourth-generation

Fayette Countian and a one-man link between the county's past and its

inevitable future.

Rivers has spent most of the

day standing and watching a pile of rubble burn, slowly. It is all that

remains of an old sharecropper's house that sat on this corner of Sandy

Creek and Hood roads for generations. A black family lived there until

recently, faithful tenants who refused offers by the Rivers family to

improve the house.

When Rivers finally knocked

it over with a front-loader recently, all that was left standing was the

outhouse, painted a stylish gray.

Rundown farm houses used to

line Sandy Creek Road, once the epicenter of an agricultural empire. Two

or three weathered cabins still stand around the bend, reminders of a

time when Fayette County was known by outsiders for its isolation and

poverty, not its fine schools and golf courses.

This rural, some say bucolic,

holdout to the area's past is about to change big, and how it changes

could have far-reaching consequences for years to come. Surely it will

bring hundreds of homes, thousands more people, offices and stores, maybe

high-tech industry, more cars and more classrooms.

Within a year, the quiet, peaceful

solitude of a spring afternoon on one of Fayette County's last farms could

be gone forever, replaced by the churn and din of construction crews carving

streets and raising up new houses. That prospect might anger slow-growth

advocates, but it fills Paul Rivers with glee.

* * *

To understand what Fayette

County is today is to understand what it once was or rather, what it was

not.

Through much of the last decade,

it was considered a muddy, dirt-poor, mostly worthless backwater, cut

off from Atlanta by a highway system that favored Coweta to the west and

Clayton to the east.

Paved roads were not widespread

until the 1950s. The population countywide was barely 8,000 when a group

of young dreamers founded Peachtree City in 1959.

The Rivers family has been

in the area for more than 100 years. Paul Rivers' great-grandfather, who

was sheriff in the 1920s, began building the family's empire, a few acres

at a time. Back then, land was cheap, especially Fayette County land.

Eventually, the holdings would

total more than 3,100 acres, stretching from Westbridge Road in the north

end of the county, down Gingercake Creek Road, along Graves and Tillman

roads and eventually down Sandy Creek Road to Hwy. 54.

As each generation came and

went, the drive to keep the family beef cattle farm going remained strong,

even as Fayette County went from sub-rural to metropolitan.

Paul Rivers would be the end

of the line, the last of a generation. A family tragedy hastened the decision.

"Nine, nine, ninety-nine," Paul Rivers responds when asked for

the date his father died.

Charles Rivers was "a

farmer's farmer" and, by all accounts from those who knew him, one

of the finest men you'd meet. He was traveling south on Ga. Highway 92

on Sept. 9, 1999, when a car pulled out in front of him from Lowery Road

in the Griggsville Community. He was killed instantly.

After the initial grief and

shock subsided and reality set in, Paul realized that it was up to him

to run the farm.

He gave it four years.

"I do not farm because

it is fun," he says. "I farm to make money."

"Everybody thinks farming

is something in the fairy tale books, and everybody just comes around

and looks at the chicky and the horse and the pig and the cow." Instead,

he says, it is sunup to sundown on those days he's not working his main

job, the one that draws a regular check and benefits, in the Delta maintenance

hangar.

He was hit hard by drought

the first three years, socked by too much rain last year. "See that

field over there," he says, pointing to acres of tall green grass,

beaten down by heavy rain. "That rainstorm cost me about $1,500."

To his credit, he tried. He

went to Athens to take classes at the University of Georgia agriculture

school, drove to South Georgia to see how the big operations make a profit,

went on the Internet to research business plans.

The most profit he made in

any given year was about $5,000, he said. Last year, more than 350 head

of cattle were sold off. The equipment was carted off or stored away.

The fields are growing hay this season, the only crop that might turn

a profit, he says. Paul's mother, retired school teacher Barbara Rivers,

moved to Lamar County where she is raising horses. Next year, Paul and

his wife Amy and newborn son, Charles Garrett, will have joined her.

The Rivers Farm is closed.

***

A Limited Trust Partnership

made up of immediate family members still holds about 750 acres of rolling,

manicured pastureland, believed to be the largest private single-owner

tract of land in the county.

Or, put another way, that's

750 acres of prime, undeveloped real estate dead center between Fayetteville,

Peachtree City and Tyrone. Fayette Community Hospital is a neighbor. The

Fayette County Board of Education purchased 60 acres nearby last July

for a high school, so sure are they of the impending invasion of newcomers.

From the smoldering remains

of the old tenant shack it is less than five miles to the square in Fayetteville,

about the same to the heart of Peachtree City, eight miles to I-85 at

Ga. Highway 74 and less than 30 minutes to Turner Field.

Location, clearly, has a price.

Some say the land is worth as much as $25 million. But the Rivers Farm

is not for sale, officially. You won't find it listed in real estate guides

or on the Internet.

With a sly grin, Paul Rivers

admits there are suitors, lots of them. Offers come in nearly every day,

and the family has listened to some of them.

But there are issues surrounding

the partnership that prevent a sale until the end of this year, Rivers

said. With the acreage coming off a 10-year conservation tax abatement

status this year, a hefty tax bill will be due in the fall, tens of thousands

of dollars.

Clearly, selling is in the

best financial interest of the family. And when it sells, Paul Rivers

says, it will go to the highest offer.

"I don't care if you put

a nuclear waste dump here," he says, joking. "I want the most

money for my land."

If he seems a little bitter,

there's a reason: Fayette County, he says, is not the place he grew up.

Newcomers move here saying they appreciate the rural lifestyle, the charm

of the farm.

"These same people honk

and cuss and throw things at me when I'm on the tractor driving down the

road," he says. "The police have even pulled me over and told

me I shouldn't be driving down the road, that it wasn't safe. It's a farm!"

Rivers said his land has been

trespassed countless times, and used as a dumping ground.

"People think it's a park,

that they can just come out here and do as they please."

The Rivers family knew all

along that this day would come, eventually. If his father were still alive,

Paul Rivers said, it likely wouldn't be coming so soon.

"He had farming in him,

it was natural," he said. "He always had to be on the tractor."

But he also saw it coming,

the younger Rivers admits. His dad knew the traffic along Sandy Creek

was growing busier, and he answered the phone and the door when developers

and prospectors and real estate agents came calling.

What becomes of the hundreds

of acres, and hundreds more adjacent to it owned by other families, is

anybody's guess. It is currently zoned either AR (in county zoning terminology

that means agricultural-residential), which requires five-acre-minimum

lots, or R-70, two-acre minimums. Nobody expects it to remain that way.

While Rivers will not say,

common sense would suggest whoever buys the land will ask for annexation

into the city of Fayetteville, which abuts the property at Fayette Community

Hospital. And that will allow for city sewer hookups. And that will allow

for hundreds more houses than could possibly be built in the area now.

will have moved on. Paul Rivers says he'll try to farm again in Lamar

County, where land is cheap, as if that matters at this point. He apologizes,

almost, for quitting and abandoning the homeplace.

"Do you blame me?"

he says. And then, "Nobody in their right mind would want to be a

farmer for a living."

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