Oooooh, I Should Have Bought the Farm!
With warm thanks to Austin “Bud” Gedney, III (Dartmouth College class of 1948) who sent us this real estate classified ad from the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, circa 1950. Anyone who has ever met Bud knows what a gentleman & a sharp mind he is!
Etna Green in Hanover
Now, lots of people have a story that goes something like this: “It was a perfect fall weekend and I was happily enjoying a weekend away from my city life in Hanover. My spouse and I attended a gathering an old classmates house and noticed that the house (or farm) next door was for sale. Everyone joked that we should BUY THE PLACE and by the end of the party I was half-serious about doing so. I went so far as to call the agent to find out how much they were asking. We walked the property and it was quite a perfect spot but we just went home and got caught up in ‘life’ and didn’t think too much about it again.”
The story typically transitions to the epilogue…”I see what the prices of properties that are half the size of the one we looked at and MY JAW DROPS! Oh how I wish we had Followed Through.”
So it turns out that when you test the veracity of these histories , yeah - they shoulda bought the farm…check out these properties and their prices:
Occom Pond in Hanover
Occom Ridge and Ropeferry Road houses typically sell at or around $1million with many worth much more. These properties rarely change hands, with very good reason.
Imagine being able to hit the reset switch and buying this palace for $21,000.00?
But who could afford those outrageous taxes of $258 a year? Why that is criminal. What need does the town have for that kind of dough?
If we look at modern day tax rates I would guess that property taxes would probably run $25,000 annually. So if the value of the house increased a hundred-fold in that time ($21,000 to $2.1million) then the taxes have probably done just about the same thing. That must mean that people were complaining in the 1950’s about as much as they complain today! (smile)
(For more examples see below.)
Etna Village in Hanover
Let’s get a bit more rural and see where this goes…
Etna has generally offered larger parcels than in-town Hanover but 210 acres with 110 of them being planted? Crazy amounts of land! You’d have to grow a lot of sweet corn to make this one pay today. I guess this land and domicile would be worth $2.5million today but that would be for development of a subdivision of cluster homes rather than the individual house lots that characterized development in the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s.
I’m kinda glad these big chunks are hard to come by these days. Wouldn’t want us to end up looking like suburban locations with hundreds of 5,000 sq ft houses lined-up along a grid network.