Land Rush On : Saturn Site: Unease Amid Prosperity
For years, nothing ever seemed to change in this tiny farming community of 1,100 people, one main street, two fire trucks and one elementary school about 30 miles south of Nashville.
Folks here still loved to gossip about the scandalous Civil War love affair between Spring Hill’s vixenish belle, Jessie McKissack Peters, and a Confederate general from Mississippi--which ended with the officer and gentleman being shot to death by Jessie’s jealous husband.
A big night out was supper at the Poplar House Restaurant, which specializes in Tennessee-style chicken, barbecue and catfish. And the town’s two stoplights still went dead automatically at 8 p.m. sharp, as if to signal bedtime for the community.
Record Investment
But, five months ago, General Motors announced that it had chosen little Spring Hill from among hundreds of competitors as the site of its $3.5-billion Saturn automobile plant--the largest industrial investment by any American business at any single time in any one place in all history.
Now, nothing in this town stands to remain the same. Land values are shooting sky high, citizens are worried about whether the small-town character of Spring Hill will be forever lost and people are uneasy about the coming influx of Yankees and their unions.
What the Gold Rush did for San Francisco, the microchip for Silicon Valley and country music for Nashville, the Saturn car--GM’s attempt to produce a subcompact competitive with Japanese models--is expected to do for Spring Hill.
When Saturn’s assembly lines start rolling in 1990--the scheduled opening--the plant will employ more than 6,000 workers--nearly six times the town’s present population--and disburse an annual payroll of more than $200 million.
20,000 More Jobs
In addition, University of Tennessee economic planners estimate, 10,000 to 20,000 more jobs will be created in the region by “spinoff” businesses and industries serving the mammoth Saturn plant and its work force.
All that is sure to mean prosperity--and problems.
Already, a forest of “For Sale” signs has sprouted on the quiet, tree-shaded residential streets and along the winding country lanes in the surrounding rolling hills of blue-green pastureland.
Hordes of out-of-town investors and speculators--many from cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles--have swept through Spring Hill, snapping up properties as fast as they can find a seller. In most instances, they have turned around and put the property back on the market at a sharply higher price.
“I’d say 90% of the stuff with a ‘For Sale’ sign is being sold for the second time,” said Alvin P. Warden, a salesman with the new Spring Hill branch of Inman Realtors.
A case in point is the stately, white-columned mansion on Main Street where the notorious Jessie McKissack Peters herself once lived and loved. A New York physician, one of the first out-of-town investors to buy in Spring Hill, plunked down $200,000 for the historic home and put it back on sale for $400,000.
For six years before Saturn, the house had gone begging for buyers at a mere $100,000.
Main Street businesses are a prime target for investors. The Poplar House Restaurant, which was valued at $200,000 just five years ago, was sold at auction in early August to Dallas investor David Chen for $450,000.
Rival Texas Bidders
The restaurant’s parking lot overflowed with the cars and trucks of Spring Hill townspeople and farmers, who watched open-mouthed as Chen’s final bid shot down the $400,000 offering of fellow Texan Steven Bell.
After the auction, Bell left Spring Hillians even more dumbstruck when he said that he had been prepared to go as high as $500,000 but decided to let Chen grab up “all the high-priced stuff.”
“There’s plenty for everybody,” he added with a smile.
Late last month, the town’s only other eating place--the Cedar Inn Restaurant--also went under the auctioneer’s gavel. It fetched $180,000; the former owner said he had paid $100,000 for it.
Elsewhere on Main Street, Luther’s Market--where a sign is up welcoming GM to Spring Hill--has been sold for a reported $750,000, three times the asking price before Saturn. The store will be demolished to make way for a new Ramada Inn, the town’s first national chain motel.
‘We Made Them Pay’
“It was an offer we couldn’t refuse,” said Bess Luther, who owned the market with her husband, Bill. “We’d never make that much money otherwise. I wouldn’t say we were being greedy. These investors say they are coming to buy Spring Hill--and we made them pay for it.”
Farm land has become especially valuable, particularly around the 2,400-acre site of the new Saturn complex. One five-acre plot on Saturn’s border has a $2-million price tag.
But not all deals have been sweet. One retired Maury County couple filed suit against two Columbia realtors for $6 million in damages, charging that the realtors had breached their client relationship and defrauded them of $552,500.
In early September, Jeff Neff, state commissioner of commerce and insurance, said gold-rush prices have been “rampant” and warned against “fast-talking investment swindlers” out to prey on unsophisticated landowners.
High Taxes Feared
Spring Hill residents who cherish the town’s rural way of life say that the “land-rush” mania is only the beginning of the problems they see ahead: high taxes, traffic jams, overcrowded schools and labor strikes.
“If you want to know how I feel about Saturn, go to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped and ask the Japanese how they felt about that,” said John Campbell, a Spring Hill farmer and dairy equipment and feedlot operator in his early 60s with deep family roots here. “It’s going to be devastating.”
How fast and how far any new development in Spring Hill will take place is a big unanswered question that has many other residents upset.
Smyrna, Tenn., 45 miles northeast of Spring Hill, offers the closest real-life model. Two years ago, Nissan Corp. opened a manufacturing plant in Smyrna that represents an investment of more than $700 million and employs 2,900 workers.
The plant’s arrival has more than doubled local sales tax revenue and ushered in an unprecedented era of prosperity for Smyrna, which has grown in population from 8,000 in 1980 to more than 12,000 today.
But Saturn’s total investment is five times that of Nissan’s, and the expected Saturn work force of 6,000 is almost six times the total population of Spring Hill. Moreover, at least half of those workers will be United Auto Workers members, largely from the North, under an agreement between the union and GM.
“I’m scared, more than anything,” one Spring Hill farmer said. All these people going around and telling you everything’s going to change but you don’t know what to expect.”
For Saturn critics, one ominous portent was a recent gift from the United Auto Workers union to the public library. The UAW sent 10 new books for the town’s reading collection, among them “Corporate Flight: Causes and Consequences of Economic Dislocation,” “Kohler on Strike: Thirty Years of Conflict” and “Lawrence 1912: The Bread and Roses Strike.”
Hesitated About Gift
Mary Fox, the town librarian, said she recoiled from accepting them at first, wondering whether they were fit reading material in such a staunchly right-to-work state as Tennessee.
“But I couldn’t do anything except take them,” she said, adding, with Southern gentility: “We have to be friendly to everyone.”
Minister Bobby Williams of the Spring Hill Church of Christ tried recently to reassure his congregation, telling the members that he had spoken with a former Spring Hillian who had worked for GM and that things might not be as bad as people feared.
“He told me many of the people that’ll be coming down here are transplanted Southerners who’ll want to come back down here,” he said. “And some of them are Christians.”
The frenzied pace of real estate activity is expected to take a quantum leap when GM begins to break ground for the new plant early next year.
“That’s when the real madness will begin,” said Ray Carroll, manager of the Spring Hill branch of Town & Country Realtors, one of the four real estate companies that have set up permanent offices in Spring Hill since the start of the Saturn boom.
Not Enough Homes
“There will be something like 4,000 construction workers in total on this project, and many of them will be looking for homes. There aren’t enough houses for sale in all of Spring Hill for anywhere near that demand. I can see people sitting out there in their cars saying, ‘Hey, I’m here to work, where am I going to live?’ ”
Officials from Spring Hill and surrounding Maury County have been racing the clock to prepare a comprehensive plan for explosive growth in housing, commercial establishments and industries.
Among other things, they want to banish porno theaters, adult book stores, fast-food restaurants and portable billboards from a proposed “scenic corridor” running along both sides of U.S. 31 from Spring Hill’s southern border to five miles out in the countryside.
This corridor includes the site of the Saturn plant, and city planners want to prevent the “honky-tonk” look of industrial strips that grew up in other places where big plants have been built.
“This has to be an orderly development if this Saturn experiment is going to work,” said Spring Hill’s 42-year-old tobacco-chewing mayor, George Jones, in private life a construction company and lumberyard owner. “Of course, no plan comes out completely 100%. But we hope we can come as close as we can to keeping Spring Hill’s small-town character instead of just taking the bridle off and letting everything run wild the way some people wish.”
As part of his campaign for controlled growth, Jones even had bumper stickers printed up at his own expense, saying: “My Home Is Not For Sale . . . Compliments of George Jones, Mayor.”
But Jones well knows the pressures to let capitalism reign unfettered.
Threatening Calls
When Jones looked as though he might pull the rug out from under the Saturn project unless he got a written agreement from Maury County over the distribution of the payments GM would make in place of taxes, he received a rash of threatening calls.
“They were saying things like, ‘You’re going to be taken care of,’ or they would ask me, ‘Do you want to sleep tonight?’ and, when I would answer, ‘Yes,’ they would say, ‘Well, we’ll see about that,’ ” Jones recalled.
The mayor stood his ground, however, and, as a result, Spring Hill now has an agreement with Maury County giving the town $1.5 million for a new city hall, $500,000 for capital improvements and $10 million to be spread out in equal installments over the next 40 years.
Despite all the disputes and doubts, most people seem to welcome the prospect of new jobs and an up-to-date town.
“The young people I grew up with had to go somewhere else for a job after high school, sometimes 30 miles or more,” said Ricky McPeak, a 23-year-old senior at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
Blacks Support Project
Blacks, who make up about 25% of Spring Hill’s population, also support the new economic order.
“I think it’s the greatest thing since black pepper,” said Milton C. Prowell, a landscaper who lived through the years when blacks here had to attend a ramshackle segregated elementary school and be bused out of the town to secondary school because the local high school was for whites only.
Prowell is not waiting for the benefits to trickle down to him, either. When the first wave of investors and speculators hit town, he paid them a visit, just like all the realtors, who were so thick that they began wearing armbands to keep from trying to sell to each other.
He found a Texas investor with a sleek Mercedes and offered to serve as a “property consultant.” Because his job as a landscaper made him familiar with the town, Prowell was able to show the investor the best bargains.
Now, Prowell proudly displays a memento of his fee for services rendered: a photostatic copy of a check from the Texan for $10,300. “I’m getting my piece of the rock,” he says with glee.
