News / Events

Straddling the border of Georgia and Florida are 300,000 acres of pristine pines and rolling, grassy hills. Hunting parties traverse the grounds, accompanied by mule-drawn, 100-year-old wagons, trained dogs, and staff on horseback in search of wild bobwhite quail. Plantation homes sit at the end of long driveways, invisible to passersby.

The region is called the Red Hills, an area designated one of America's "Last Great Places" by the Nature Conservancy. Plantation owners want to keep the wide-open spaces undeveloped, partly to preserve quail habitats for hunting, but largely to act as stewards of the land and homes that have been in their families for generations.

"We want to make the world safe for bobwhite quail," says Charles Chapin III, a retired banker who lives in Oldwick, N.J., and spends four months a year on the quail-hunting plantation in Thomasville, Ga., developed by his grandfather at the turn of the century. [read more]

In the early 1990s, Tamra Call and her husband O. Jay Call began to look for a vacation property that they could develop and eventually retire on. "It was a dream we had, to own a ranch," Call said. Their criteria were, on the face of it, easily attainable: The property needed to offer some privacy, yet also be less than an hour's flight from the Ogden, Utah, headquarters of Flying J, (now FJ Management), the multibillion-dollar oil and refining, truck stop, banking, adn insurance business her husband had founded in the late 1960s. [read more]

Los Robles, California

This 640-acre San Diego County gem features a 4,000-square-foot owner's home, two guest houses, two caretakers' homes, a 19-stall barn, a 6-stall mare motel, an outdoor riding arena, a skeet range, and a dozen water wells. [read more]

A rare opportunity to acquire a major Great Plains farmland holding presents itself on December 1 when Thomas Land Company goes to auction at the Keith County Fairgrounds in Ogallala. The 28,645-acre farm includes 26,739 deeded acres and 1,906 leased acres of Nebraska state farm and ranchland with 11,705 acres in dryland crops, 13,293 acres in ranchland, and 3,647 acres in irrigated farmland. "It is very rare to find an assemblage of this magnitude and diversity being offered for sale," said Scott Shuman of Hall and Hall Auctions. [read more]