A New Ruralism Rising

As the pace of life accelerates, many Americans see a return to living on the land as a return to simpler times.

by Deborah R. Huso
photography by Ralph Daniel, Ginger Larson, courtesy Homestead Preserve and Prairie Crossing

SweetTea Journal (Fall/Winter 2006) – It’s a place that reveals itself slowly, carefully, like a mother lifting a blanket from her sleeping infant. First there is the dense, dark canopy of live oaks over Old St. Augustine Road as it winds its way through a lowland forest—thick with the smell of summer rain, the pregnant raindrops releasing their grip on the branches above to spill onto the glassy road. Long ago, this road connected the Spanish towns of Pensacola and St. Augustine, with missions here and there along the way, as it plied its slowly civilizing route through the backcountry of Northwest Florida.

Today, this small stretch of canopy outside Tallahassee serves as both prelude and introduction to a national movement called New Ruralism, which stresses the importance of humans’ relationship to nature and the landscape we inhabit. As that old landscape reemerges behind the veil of planted-over pine forests, more and more people are rediscovering these time-tested rural values here in Florida, as well as in other states across the country. The latest incarnation of that vision in Northwest Florida is a place called WhiteFence Farms at Red Hills, a St. Joe company community that is about a twenty-minute drive from downtown Tallahassee. But like the old road that leads to its entrance, WhiteFence Farms, a community of minifarms ranging in acreage from three to fifteen acres, seems worlds away.

Here, a house called Planter’s Retreat, the Southern Living and Progressive Farmer Idea House and Farmstead, stands as a model for what this rural community will become in the future. The board-and-batten home with a metal roof resembles a neat white barn in a placid field and sits as if it has always lived here at the edge of a wide and dark natural pond. Songbirds flit from the branches of peach and persimmon trees, shaking down the remnant drops of a recent shower, as graceful white egrets and curious blue herons fish along the water’s edge. On the pond’s opposite shore, geese announce themselves in waves of symphony, scattering ripples across the glassy surface. A pair of Adirondack chairs invites contemplation of the scene, so peaceful and unassuming. This isn’t the persistent blue of ocean, long horizon-skimming vistas, and rhythmic whoosh of whitecaps on the coast that many people associate with Florida. It is definitely different and intriguing. It is a return to rural Florida and a return to simpler times. It is also an intentional attempt to slow the pace and follow the rhythms of the land so that one’s life is governed not by a clock, but rather by the movement of the seasons, the sun, and the moon.

But WhiteFence Farms represents only a small sample of a much larger effort by developers to bring landscapes—even those we might dismiss—to everyone’s attention again. Their efforts are helping feed people’s native hunger for a place in the woods and fields where they can follow their passions, whether that means work, play, gardening, equestrian pursuits, or just time to sit and think—all the pastimes that seem so incompatible in the busy, workaday urban lifestyle.

New Ruralism Isn’t New
According to statistics from the USDA, there’s a national trend of people moving back to the land. And many rural areas are growing at the fastest rate in more than twenty years, particularly in rural counties close to metropolitan areas. While The St. Joe Company has played a significant role in defining the trend called New Ruralism, there really isn’t anything new about people returning to the land.

Steve Filmanowicz, communications director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, says that conservation communities in rural areas borrow ideals from the formalized New Urbanism movement that championed regionalism, vernacular buildings, and pedestrian-friendly town settings to create a shared sense of place. “Rural areas come under a lot of pressure to be developed in conventional ways, the beginning of sprawl,” he says. “But New Urbanists working in rural areas seek to build on or establish compact hamlets and villages and seek ways to preserve the existing rural character.” Similarly, by taking the proven principles of New Urbanism and applying them to a rural landscape, the New Ruralism movement seeks to reinvigorate that intimate connection to the land that was once such a vital part of the American experience, be it on a farm or in a small rural community.

About an hour northwest of Chicago, a nationally lauded conservation community that’s known as Prairie Crossing has attracted families of all ages and income levels to its twelve-year-old rural development. “The aim of Prairie Crossing,” says Vicky Ranney, president of the community, “is to provide people with good houses, retail, and condos in connection with preserving the maximum amount of open space.” Prairie Crossing consists of about 675 acres, 90 acres of it an organic farm—much of the rest native wetlands and prairie—and then a community of clustered homes and businesses, which all have access to the commonly held rural landscape around them. “We wanted to see if we could save this land by developing it,” Ranney explains.

That’s the case in Virginia, where developers at Celebration Associates, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, are banking on the appeal of special rural places. Nearly five years ago, the company—its founding principals instrumental in the development of the New Urbanist community of Celebration, Florida—purchased 11,500 acres of pristine mountain land near the historic Homestead resort in Hot Springs. The developers sold 9,250 acres of that land to The Nature Conservancy, and then consciously decided to limit development on the remaining acreage to no more than 450 homes—all built in the historic architectural styles of rural western Virginia, many clustered in English- or Colonial-style villages surrounded by undeveloped spaces. Because the development has a variety of neighborhoods, some homes are more like small farms while others occupy small lots looking out onto a large open space. But structures are positioned to fade into wooded lines to prevent the destruction of views across open meadows.

This new community is called Homestead Preserve, and environmental stewardship is one of its core values. After spending nearly four years studying the land, the developers designated specific areas where homeowners could build without negatively impacting the land, views, or rural character of Hot Springs. And while Homestead Preserve offers an unspoiled landscape of private retreat, it also fosters a sense of community, the center of which is a historic Old Dairy barn complex in Warm Springs. Currently undergoing restoration, the complex will serve as a community recreation center and spa.

Charles Adams, managing director of Homestead Preserve, says he was determined to save the pristine landscape surrounding The Homestead for future generations and to make sure the community his company builds fits into the rural existence surrounding it. “When we were living in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was watching how farms were being acquired by developers who didn’t have respect for the agrarian landscape and the pastoral viewsheds,” Adams says. “I thought there had to be a better way. Preservation is the better way.”

Saving Special Places
In Northwest Florida, The St. Joe Company is doing just that. It’s creating a New Ruralist environment on old farmland, among the newly cleared landscapes of former pine plantations, and alongside the inland waterways and ponds of the Panhandle’s less populated interior. James Murley, director of the Catanese Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions at Florida Atlantic University, says so far he is impressed with how The St. Joe Company is able to make good on its promises to keep rural and natural landscapes as intact as possible while still making way for real-estate development. Murley says that since the arrival of Peter S. Rummell, chairman, president, and CEO of The St. Joe Company, Northwest Florida’s largest private landowner has made evident its commitment to preserving special places. Already well versed in the concepts of New Urbanism, Rummell came to the company in 1997 as a former executive of Walt Disney Imagineering, where, like Homestead Preserve’s Adams, he had worked on the town of Celebration, Florida. Murley says, “On one level, New Ruralism is a brand-new concept that comes from St. Joe and relates to their product here in Florida, but it could have applications well beyond that.”

And so it has. This doesn’t surprise people who earn a living at “place-making” such as Ed Blake, founding principal of The Landscape Studio in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and master planner and first executive director of The Crosby Arboretum, part of Mississippi State University’s outreach in Picayune. “If people understand that a place is one of a kind, that creates value,” he says.

The St. Joe Company hired Blake to help find those one-of-a-kind places among its landholdings in Northwest Florida, and, as with Homestead Preserve in Virginia, the company spent years evaluating its landscape to determine which areas it should develop and which areas it should protect. In RiverCamps on Crooked Creek, a 1,500-acre stretch of forested lowland along West Bay, Blake found fifty-three “jewels” that he suggested the company feature as property amenities. Those jewels consist of salt flat marshes, spider lily swamps, duck potato marshes, and placid egret ponds. Under Blake’s direction, The St. Joe Company turned the old pine plantation back into the natural savanna it once was. “We set ecological succession back to zero,” Blake explains. “The native grasses and flowering plants came back.” And so did the people.

Defining a Movement to the Land
Pat and Toni Dineen of Shalimar near Fort Walton Beach recently purchased a lot at RiverCamps on Crooked Creek. “Where we live now is a regular community development,” Toni says. “But when we go to RiverCamps, we feel like we’re camping, and the home styles look kind of like cabins.”

“It’s very much the undisturbed Florida landscape,” says Debbie Dudley, who, along with her husband, also bought a homesite on Crooked Creek in 2005. The Dudleys currently have a home in Rosemary Beach, but say they are looking for more elbow room. “We loved the idea of keeping the natural landscape intact and having more space,” she says.

Dudley is not alone in her tendencies. As more families move to the country, many New Ruralist developments are being designed to appeal to a portion of the baby-boomer generation that looks to these rural spaces as a place to decompress and slow the pace of a hectic life. Surrounding themselves with fields and common areas where crops or orchards will be cultivated, most of these people are not farmers, but they do share a belief in the value of a life well lived in a rural setting.

But for some, the New Ruralist trend is about more than just reliving the nostalgia of the American farm. It’s about preserving family heritage as well.

When William Utsey of Choctaw County, Alabama, wanted to help one of his sons move back to the family farm from Washington, D.C., where he worked for a U.S. senator, this father knew he needed to make the thousands of acres the family owned (much of it since the nineteenth century) offer a better living than it could provide with hay and timber. “I wanted to be near my family, and I wanted to work with the land,” says son Jake, who is a full-timer on the farm running a commercial hunting operation.

Jake’s brother, Jeff, who practices law in Choctaw County and also works the family farm, says of all the places he has lived, he’s happiest back home. “We had a happy childhood here,” Jeff says. “Everybody knows everybody. Rural America is the backbone of this country, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

The land that has become so important to people such as the Utseys is found in abundance here in Northwest Florida. It is visible at the Southern Living and Progressive Farmer Idea House and Farmstead, where old farmland, secret woodlands, and the gently civilizing hand of man come together at the company’s newest community: WhiteFence Farms at Red Hills. Here, Planter’s Retreat stands as a demonstration of what this New Ruralism—a term that The St. Joe Company has adopted and helped formally define—will look like in Florida. This is not WaterColor, the walkable New Urban community the company created on the south Walton County coast. At WhiteFence Farms, screened porches overlook not a bustling street, but rather a lush domain of inland pools, virgin oaks, and waterfowl by the dozens. It’s a living painting.

WhiteFence Farms outside Tallahassee is only one of many retreats The St. Joe Company has in the works. And while it’s designed to create an agrarian environment for owners who will most likely live on the development’s small farms full time, other places such as RiverCamps on Crooked Creek near Panama City Beach are second-home retreats in a deeply wild environment on West Bay, a landscape of marshlands, tidal creeks, and oceans of grass. At WireGrass Preserves in Calhoun County, other dedicated outdoor enthusiasts will soon be able to choose from 50- to 150-acre recreational tracts within a 1,000- to 3,000-acre community. And while places such as WhiteFence Farms allow owners to enjoy a rural lifestyle without having to work the land, some homeowners likely will keep their own vegetable gardens, flower gardens, and orchards and will be able to take advantage of advice and assistance from WhiteFence’s staff farmer. While living in this bucolic setting away from the hustle of city life, they can (if they wish) still be connected to it via fully wired homes, thanks to today’s modern technologies.

Regardless of the chosen level of connection, people seem to be returning to the land not so much to leave the twenty-first century behind as to rediscover the many traditional, even quintessential American values and opportunities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because any new movement tends to bring with it an overly severe reaction against its predecessor, the massive move toward urbanization in the previous century nearly obscured what many Americans treasure from their youth: a sense of strong community, shared family experiences, and a connection to the land.

Set amid centuries-old live oaks, large farmsteads, orchards, and community farm fields, New Ruralist developments such as WhiteFence Farms and Homestead Preserve reside at the forefront of a movement that reminds Americans what we risk losing in our constant rush to modernize, to be productive, to be progressive. After all, ask any farmer: you can’t alter the seasons and you can’t make corn grow faster than nature intends.

There’s a metaphor in that for us all.

And for Debbie Dudley and her family, who plan to live in RiverCamps on Crooked Creek for about nine months out of the year once their new home is built, these abstractions are the tangible reasons why they are seeking out a different way of life in the countryside. The lifestyle will be nostalgic—one of old-time Florida where the pace of life is more simple and more attuned to nature’s seasons. “I did not grow up in a rural area,” Dudley says. “I’ve been in big cities all my life, and that’s probably why I like RiverCamps so much.” It’s easy for her to imagine life on her quiet, wooded homesite on West Bay with its visiting waterbirds and nesting ospreys. “As Florida keeps growing, places like RiverCamps will become more and more valuable.”