Yep, J.C. Hyde and his brother Buck were dirt farmers — all they ever wanted to be. They worked the soil, lived as bachelors in a cabin without running water and slept soundly.

Most days, they melded with the soil of their 135 acres in east Cobb County without interruption, easily slipping into the rhythm of man and mule and plow.

Andy Sharp/AJC (ENLARGE)

Morning Washburn, who has lived in a cabin on property adjacent to Hyde Farm since 1971, when she was 23, pauses inside an old barn.

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Occasionally, a suit with a silk tie and Italian slip-ons would come by and tell them how wealthy they could be — maybe retire to Florida — if they'd sell some land. Like that bottom land with the half-mile fronting the Chattahoochee River. The million-dollar houses wouldn't be that near their century-old cabin.

The brothers — always polite listeners — would let the developer talk himself out. Then J.C. and Buck would walk over to the black walnut tree behind the kitchen, unhitch their mules and get back to work on the farm the family operated within three miles of Atlanta's boundaries until 2004.

The rows of peas and beans, sweet potatoes and tomatoes and what was reputed to be some of the best Silver Queen corn in all of metro Atlanta needed their attention; not developers who, after the Hydes' father died in 1972, became as much a bother as corn borers or soil rot.

J.C. and Buck have passed on, but a transaction to be announced today virtually assures that the hardwood forest and the soil terraces the brothers worked with such respect will remain an undeveloped part of metro Atlanta, some of it as a working farm.

The Trust for Public Land plans to announce today that it has bought the farm's remaining 95 acres for $14.2 million, expanding the publicly owned land between Johnson Ferry Road and the city of Roswell that is dominated by the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.

2nd big preservation buy

The purchase, combined with the 40 acres of the farm the trust acquired in 1993, means the entire 135 acres will be preserved, the result of a process that began in 1991 when Rand Wentworth, then the trust's Georgia director, first talked with J.C. Hyde.

"We should all be grateful that the family chose conservation over another subdivision," said Wentworth, now president of the Land Trust Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes land conservation.

The tract also adds another piece to a nine-year effort to secure riverside property from Helen to Columbus.

The Hyde purchase is the second large preservation acquisition in Cobb in two months. The county agreed last month to buy 112 acres on Dallas Highway and add it to a 44-acre park to create a tract in west Cobb only 35 acres smaller than Atlanta's Piedmont Park.

Ultimately, Cobb and the National Park Service are expected to own the Hyde farm and operate it as a working farm where visitors can see what agriculture was like in the early 1900s.

Morning Washburn, who lives next to the farm, is excited about resurrecting the vitality of the land she saw through the brothers' eyes.

She started learning about their special relationship with the land when, as a 23-year-old in 1971, she moved into a rustic cabin on adjacent property and began working the fields with them.

Earlier this week, she walked through a glade toward the river and paused in dappled sunlight to point out one of the towering poplars on the property and told a story about J.C.'s intimate relationship with the family farm.

A logger hired to clear some dead pines was trying to persuade J.C. to cut the century-old poplars for board wood. The logger couldn't understand how a man of apparently meager means could pass up all that cash.

"J.C. just looked at him and said, 'Well, I like to watch the squirrels run in the

trees,' " said Washburn, who lives in a cabin built by the Power family, the original owners of the Hyde farm and adjacent land. "I was so impressed by these men."

Like savvy entrepreneurs, the brothers created a franchise for themselves in the produce business: Buck, in Roswell; J.C. had Marietta. For a time, they also sold beef in Ansley Park.

After Buck died in 1987, J.C. stayed with Marietta, hauling his produce up to the square and selling from his tailgate.

By then, there was trouble in the soil that even a veteran farmer couldn't sense.

The land, bought by the Hydes' father in 1920, was worth more and more.

Estate-size houses were coming out of the ground along the "Hooch" faster than flint corn. East Cobb and Sandy Springs on the other side of the river were full-blown bedroom communities.

Money needed for taxes

Hyde learned his land's value when the federal and state revenue people came looking for their piece of Buck's estate: nearly $600,000 in taxes.

As soon as word got out that Hyde needed money, he had more suitors than honeybees on his okra flowers; many thought the only question was whether the check for the land would be seven or eight digits.

Hyde wasn't selling. The brothers had made a death-bed promise to their father that they would not sell the farm.

But tax collectors have the legal juice to get what they want. So Hyde took the only offer he could live with: He sold the 40 acres along the river to the Trust for Public Land for $1.2 million in 1993 in a deal that allowed him to farm those acres, along with his others.

His placid existence saved, Hyde returned to farming. Only when he died on March 3, 2004, at age 94, did the seeds he had sown with the trust a decade earlier begin to germinate in unexpected ways.

Part of the 1993 deal gave the trust a first-offer right to buy the other 95 acres for $12 million, In 2005, it notified Hyde's 12 heirs that it would exercise the right.

The heirs sued to block the sale and in court papers said they had offers of up to $18 million.

As the weeds of the legal system threatened to choke the seedlings of the trust's deal, a group of east Cobb residents, who organized a year earlier to raise funds for the farm, fretted about the potential consequences of the lawsuits. They stepped up fund-raising efforts, working with the trust.

A seventh-grader sold sweet potatoes and donated $185. A donated billboard — "Give Today ... Time is Running Out" — rolled through the county on a truck. People who didn't know Hyde farm from the High Museum opened their wallets.

U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who built his real estate business from an east Cobb base, promised to work on federal funding for the property.

For a time, it appeared all the efforts were like working barren land. The U.S. District Court in Atlanta upheld the trust's contract, but some smaller points in the ruling made the trust decide to appeal.

With both sides looking at spending more money on legal fees, a settlement was negotiated.

'Such a rich history'

Members of the Hyde estate declined to comment Thursday on the transaction or plans for the farm.

Others were elated at the outcome for the farm.

"It's a special place," said Isakson, a former member of the trust's board. "As east Cobb grew, here was this pristine place, an 1830s working farm in the 20th century."

Isakson said he has asked for $3.1 million in the federal budget for the National Park Service's end of the farm acquisition when that happens. The park service also has about $3 million on hand.

Cobb Commission Chairman Sam Olens said the county will put up $5 million from its parks bond issue and reach a working agreement with the federal government.

"Our goal is to have part of this operating by fall '09," Olens said.

Few people will be happier than Linda Hodges, a member of the Friends of Hyde Farm group who lives up the street and first went onto the property 20 years ago when she took her children to see a hog slaughtered.

"These men were living as pioneers," she said. "There's such a rich history on this farm and now it will be preserved."