The ambulance turned off Feedwire Road onto the pin oak-lined lane to his family's farm market. Though his eyes were all but shut, paramedics propped him up, hoping he might catch a final glimpse of his Sweet Arrow Farm - the apple orchard, the pumpkins and produce, the soft and hard maples hemming the way home.
Then they carried him into his stone house off Wilmington Pike - the house he and his late wife, Evelyn, had bought 46 years earlier from the great-nephew of National Cash Register founder John H. Patterson.
"That night, he smiled," said Jim Dille, Charles Dille's youngest son. "I believe he saw where he was."
Sweet Arrow Farm put Charles Dille at peace before he died on Aug. 2, 1999, at age 85.
It has put his eight adult children at odds ever since.
A way of life, sentiment, a mint of money - farms often represent all these things. And when they pass from one generation to the next, they can create difficult and sometimes divisive choices.
As a result, much of the Miami Valley's countryside is in limbo like never before. The combination of more elderly farmers on the cusp of retirement and rising values of farmland for development rather than agriculture creates increasing pressure and incentive to sell the land. The effects of selling farms for top dollar are visible throughout the region's receding countryside. Most Miami Valley counties lost cropland between 1987 and 1997, up to 10.6 percent in Warren County.
Between 1982 and 1997, the Dayton-Springfield metropolitan area grew 17.9 percent in urbanized land area, according to a report released in July by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution. In Ohio's nine other metropolitan areas, urbanized land grew 25 percent to 43 percent during the same period. And, nationally, excluding Alaska, it increased 47 percent.
Consider Sugarcreek Twp., whose population grew 95 percent during the 1990s to 6,629. Spurred by nearby Bellbrook, Centerville, Kettering and Beavercreek, residential development has speckled its northwest corner. Meanwhile, the opening of I-675 in 1986 through that part of the township triggered an era of large-scale commercial development.
Sweet Arrow Farm lies in the middle of it all.
After intersecting with Kettering's suburban avenues and drives for miles, five-lane Wilmington Pike curves south and follows the Montgomery-Greene county line, with Centerville on the right and woods nearly half a mile long on the left.
Among the woods, 600 feet from the road, a stately stone house stands empty, as it has since Dr. Dille's death two years ago.
The woods are a mere fraction of 489 acres bisected by Interstate 675 and bounded by housing and a new Home Depot. Before dusk on clear winter days, the home-improvement superstore casts a shadow north across the farm's frontage on Feedwire Road.
The Dilles' contract with a local farm family that raises more than 200 acres of soybeans and corn on their land. Since 1990, when the Dilles' farm market opened, Jim Dille also has grown more than 30 varieties of apples, sweet corn, peaches, pumpkins and other produce on the farm.
The peaceful setting of tree-flanked lanes and orchards belies the sibling discord at Sweet Arrow Farm, home to three of Dr. Dille's eight children and their families. Jim, Susie and John Dille live in isolated houses on Feedwire, Brown and Swigart roads, respectively.
Since 1998, family members living both on and off the farm have reported brothers and sisters to township police four times for alleged tire slashing, telephone harassment and theft at the farm. One brother this summer admitted to shooting up the farm's irrigation equipment, reportedly while trying to hit a raccoon. He told police he was part-owner of the equipment and would fix it when he had the money.
Family discord left little doubt that Charles Dille's death would precipitate a feud over Sweet Arrow Farm. It was a feud that drew strength not only from sibling dissension, but from the developing landscape around it.
That landscape has created vast disparities between Sweet Arrow Farm's market value as farmland and its value as developable real estate. Family members have said they have been offered $9 million or more for the farm's most valuable 72 acres, located south of I-675 between Wilmington Pike and Possum Run Road. That's more than $125,000 an acre for land that would fetch only a few thousand dollars an acre if sold for farming.
The entire farm's appraised value - far less than its market value - is about $3.2 million.
"We've been offered prices that you just can't walk away from," said John Dille, whose two out-of-town brothers, Murphy and Michael, also view selling their shares of the farm to developers as a sound financial decision.
But as the land's value as real estate exponentially outstripped its value as farmland, Jim Dille and his four sisters' resolve to hold onto their childhood home grew more firm.
"We don't want millions of dollars," said Winter, 55, a teacher and ardent environmentalist who lives in Warren County and cherishes the farm's wildlife. "That just gives you millions of dollars. Then what do you do with it? It doesn't make you happy. It doesn't give you tranquility."
In June 2000, Jim Dille and his four sisters - Kathleen Winter, Carol Caldwell, Patricia Evanko and Susie Dille - filed a lawsuit to unseat Roger Pfister, trustee of their father's trust. The five claimed Pfister was not abiding by their father's wish to preserve the farm.
Charles Dille's living trust provides for Pfister's removal only if his eight children unanimously agree. Murphy, Michael and John Dille did not, so they were named as defendants in the lawsuit.
In referring the matter to mediation in October 2000, Greene County Probate Judge Robert Hagler admonished the Dilles to put aside "anger and hostility."
But Winter said the feud cost her one of her closest friends: her twin brother, Michael, a radiologist who lives in Atlanta.
"I didn't go to his son's wedding," she said. "I didn't go to his daughter's graduation."
She recalled a conversation the two had about the time the lawsuit was filed.
"You think the farm is more important than family?" he asked her.
"Yes, I do."
That was 19 months ago.
"We've never spoken since," Winter said.
THE INTERSTATE
Thirty-five years before his farm divided his children, Charles Dille tried to keep an interstate from dividing his farm.
"I sort of feel today like you do when you go to a marriage and they say speak up or forever hold your piece," the founder of Dille Laboratories Corp. told more than 225 people gathered in the auditorium at Walter E. Stebbins High School for a public hearing on I-675. "So I guess I better say it."
Charles Dille was a doctor, not a farmer. But for several minutes that afternoon of March 9, 1965, he might have passed for one in describing what was at stake if I-675 bisected his 500-acre farm.
"We will actually financially benefit from this assuming that there will be an interchange at Wilmington Pike because we realize, of course, this very definitely increases the value of our land," he said. "However, on the other side, we lose two barns, two houses - possibly a third house. . . . We'll lose approximately one mile of farmland on either side.
"In other words, I think we will be probably the most involved property owner of anyone in the entire route."
He knew his farm was on the fringe, and so he pointed out the advantages of having open space close to Kettering instead of packing people on a bus every month to "take them down to Hueston Woods" in Preble and Butler counties.
"We built a couple of ponds for fishing, we arranged to have hayrides, we have had scout campouts, we've had horse riding, we've had kids come out and fly their model airplanes, we've had them come out and do skeet shooting and all these things that you can do in an open area," he said. "Maybe these things aren't important, I don't know. It seems to me a kid that has something like this to do is not going to get into mischief."
In essence, he said with a tinge of sarcasm, paving over part of his farm for I-675 would be a penalty for preserving it.
"Every route that has ever been proposed goes through some part of the 500 acres," he said. "Had we been far-sighted, we could very easily . . . have gone ahead and done what everyone else did, built houses and then we wouldn't have had the problem. Perhaps we can hurry . . . and get these houses up."
If that comment raised any doubt about Charles Dille's loyalty to his farm, his closing remarks erased it.
"I'm just one isolated taxpayer that would like to suggest, let's keep the country green. I don't want to move the highway to my neighbors. I don't want to move the highway anyplace. I'm saying, let's not . . . build the highway.
"Let's forget it and improve what we already have."
THE FRINGE
For 20 years after that public hearing, Charles Dille got his wish.
Then, in the mid-1980s, the interstate came through.
"Back in the '50s and '60s, this was a very popular strip for drag racing," Jim Dille said as he drove his pick-up down Feedwire Road. "It was real popular because it was nice and straight - it didn't have the built-up hump right there."
He gestured toward the road's overpass, built when I-675 bisected the farm. A steady stream of cars sped by as he approached the farm lane, almost directly across from Home Depot's construction site.
"I could sit in the middle of the road here probably 15 years ago," Dille said. "Now, it'd be hard to get out the driveway."
Daily traffic passing his family's fruit and vegetable retail operation increased to 11,943 in June 1998 from 2,279 in July 1978 - a 524 percent increase. That might seem to bode well for someone whose livelihood has depended on selling homegrown sweet corn and peaches, but Jim Dille frowned through his beard as he talked of the traffic.
Some people who pulled off Feedwire Road this summer brought him business, but others brought him business cards bearing their real-estate companies' phone numbers. Jim Dille ripped them up.
But it hasn't been as easy to ignore the economic realities facing his family's farm.
In 1990, township trustees approved the rezoning of 139 acres of farmland in the I-675 corridor for business and commercial use. Five Seasons Country Club would be built on about 25 acres carved from the tract. So would Home Depot, on another 20.8-acre tract that Meijer originally bought in 1992 for $1.5 million, or about $72,000 an acre. A little over a year later, Meijer sold the same 20.8 acres for $2 million - about $96,000 an acre - to Richard Schwartz. Last year, Schwartz sold the acreage for $3.74 million - nearly $180,000 an acre, for a return of 87 percent in six years - to Sugarcreek Crossing LLC.
The person who sought the rezoning of the 139 acres and sold the 20.8 acres to Meijer was Charles Dille.
"He sold it because he knew he had to have the money to pay the inheritance tax," Winter said. "He didn't want to sell it. But he knew money had to come from somewhere."
A CHANGE OF HEART
When John Dille was still single, he thought he would grow old on the farm where he grew up - the farm where, as a child, he whiled away summer days in woods, meadows and fields without seeing another person.
So in 1983, at age 30, he moved into a ranch-style house he had built on part of the farm off Swigart Road.
"Originally, I wanted to keep the farm the way it was," he said.
Eventually, things changed. He became a husband, then a dad three times over. His three-bedroom house, roomy in his single days, got cozy in a hurry.
John Dille said his deteriorating relationship with some siblings also explains why he would already have moved away from Sweet Arrow Farm if he had the means - why he will move elsewhere once he cashes in his share of the farm.
"People started getting odd," he said. "The atmosphere became very unpleasant. That's when I decided I didn't want to raise my kids out here."
Now 48, John Dille attributes the tension in part to the considerable age gap among his brothers and sisters. His oldest sibling, Carol Caldwell, is 64; the youngest, Jim, 43.
As his ties to his family frayed, John Dille said his ties to Sweet Arrow Farm also withered. And that, he said, is when he began seeing the farm differently.
"It wasn't a farm," he said. "It was just land."
He paused.
"It's an asset. And it's a valuable asset that needs to be turned over."
John Dille said his father looked at the farm differently.
"I think Dad wanted to keep the farm as long as he could," he said. "He was losing money and he knew it. But he loved it. . . . I think he'd still want it to be a fruit farm."
But he wishes his father had made his plans for the farm more clear.
"People need to know exactly what the plans for the farm are," he said. "At least, it would have helped in my family."
THE IRONIES
The sweet corn simmered beneath a sweltering August sun, its saccharine smell strong in the air as Jim Dille pulled ears from stalks and tossed them into a red wagon.
He bit into some raw corn to test its sweetness. So did his 4-year-old daughter, Becky, as she tagged along.
"Dad, there's a groundhog up here," Jim's 10-year-old son, Matt, yelled from the blue New Holland tractor pulling the wagon as it inched across the field, flattening stalks in front of it.
"Hit him in the head with a piece of corn," Dille replied.
Jim Dille has tried to keep larger critters out of his corn with three strands of electrified wire. In doing so, he has sought to ward off the very wildlife some of his sisters want to protect by preserving the farm.
It's just one of the ironies besetting a large farm on the suburban fringe.
Many people built homes in Sugarcreek Twp. in the 1980s and 1990s because of the countryside. But the possible development of at least part of that countryside, including Sweet Arrow Farm, would be an important boost to the tax base that serves the township's growing population.
A little over 60 percent of Sugarcreek Twp.'s tax base goes to the growing Bellbrook school district, while the remaining 40 percent is divided about evenly between the township and the county, township Trustee Jeanne Nydegger said. Sweet Arrow Farm's 2000 property taxes, payable this year, were $15,606.35.
The township's recently completed comprehensive land-use plan makes recommendations on what should be built if various parts of the farm are developed: a campus-style office development in the woods around Dr. Dille's former home to preserve as many trees as possible; moderate-density residential development of about two units an acre on the rest of the farm west of I-675 and north of Feedwire Road; offices for the most valuable 72 acres between Wilmington Pike and Possum Run Road south of I-675; and residential development of 1 to 2.5 acres per unit on parts of the farm east of I-675.
Nydegger said there's considerable interest in the farm's fate. It's the gateway to Sugarcreek Twp. for those traveling out of Kettering on Wilmington Pike, after all. And its owners have deep roots in the community, she said.
"It's a concern, but people aren't wringing their hands," Nydegger said. "They're interested. A lot of people know the Dilles. (The farm) is a prominent piece of property in the community."
THE SETTLEMENT
Jim Dille sat through the settlement hearing this summer at the Greene County Courthouse. He saw a map of Sweet Arrow Farm colored in yellow, orange and green. He heard the attorneys go on record with probable and possible plans for its partial development.
After four mediation conferences, prompted by his and his sisters' lawsuit to unseat Roger Pfister as trustee of their father's trust, it had come to this.
Parcel 1. Parcel 2. Parcel 3. Parcel 4. Labels for the land his family called home.
Parcel 1 was 72 acres just south of I-675 along Wilmington Pike, the remnants of the 139 acres of farmland rezoned in 1990 for business and commercial use.
Roger Pfister, who would remain trustee as part of the settlement agreement, could pursue leasing the 72 acres to a developer. The net income from that lease, minus any expenses and taxes, would be divided equally among Dr. Dille's eight children.
Once the amount of outstanding federal taxes and the lease agreement were finalized, the 72 acres and the rest of the farm would be appraised. Then the 72 acres could be developed. The land could be leased to a developer through August 2009, the 10th anniversary of Charles Dille's death, at which time it could be sold.
Perhaps as early as 2003, Clyo Road would be extended through the 72 acres, maximizing its value.
After the 72 acres were developed, the entire farm, including the developed portion, would be reappraised. If the 72 developed acres were at least 3/8 of the farm's total value - Murphy, Michael and John Dille's share - no more development would occur during the life of the trust unless all eight heirs agreed to develop more or if additional estate or income taxes came due. If the value of the 72 developed acres was not enough to pay off the three brothers, development could continue.
The soybean and sweet-corn fields off Brown Road and the orchards off Feedwire - all could potentially be developed under the terms of the settlement agreement.
So could the land beneath Jim Dille's house, which sits on Parcel 3.
"If 3 for whatever reason needs to be developed for payment of different things, or to provide liquidity for the three defendants, then . . . Jim will be given adequate notice," John Cloud, attorney for Jim Dille's brothers, said during the settlement hearing. "At that time, Roger as successor trustee will work to provide Jim and his family adequate similar kind of suitable housing, whether that would be rental unit somewhere else or relocation within the other part of the farm . . . east of 675."
THE TRUSTEE
Though 30 years younger than Charles Dille and a former Bellbrook classmate of some of his children, Roger Pfister said the doctor was a close friend - almost like a second father after his own parents died fairly young.
"This is a favor to a friend more than anything else," Pfister said of his service as trustee. "There are enough differences in the family that I think Charlie felt if he made any one person trustee, it would have caused dissension. . . . He didn't want to augment those differences."
He sat back in his chair in his Columbus office, where he works as an consultant for the Trade Education Network.
"Farmland is probably more of an emotional issue than it is anything else," he said. Scientific advances have boosted yields tremendously in recent decades, he noted, resulting in large surpluses of grain that have more than compensated for farmland that has been developed. "It's so hard to deal with the realities that face that farm."
One of those realities is the estate tax. Charles Dille's trust paid out nearly $104,000 in estate taxes in May 2000 to the state, 64 percent of it going to Sugarcreek Twp., according to township receipts. That's just a small fraction of the $713,429 in additional federal estate taxes to be paid over 10 years starting in 2005.
Much of the approximately $1 million in cash and securities held by Dille Laboratories Corp. has been earmarked for the payment of the estate taxes. The corporation's assets once included both Dr. Dille's clinic and the farm, but the clinic has been sold.
Pfister said farm operating expenses such as labor fluctuate from year to year, but confirmed that they generally are in the ballpark of $100,000.
"It's not hard to love a farm," Pfister said. "It's hard to afford a farm."
LAST STAND?
The bitterness was evident in Jim Dille's voice.
Sweet Arrow Farm won't be reopening to the public next year, he said. He has already bulldozed part of the orchards.
Two weeks ago, he was fired by his own siblings from his job as farm manager.
"The sweet corn is gone," he said two weeks ago. "Everything is gone."
But Roger Pfister last week would not rule out a reopening of the retail operation.
"It's definitely still a possibility," Pfister said. " . . . It has to be an ideal location for a farm market."
The farm's retail operation had fewer customers this year, prompting Jim Dille to question the community's support for the farm. Pfister mentioned traffic congestion associated with construction on Feedwire Road also might have inconvenienced potential customers.
Pfister also said no lease is in the works for the farm's 72 acres between Wilmington Pike and Possum Run Road. In fact, developers have told him the Dayton area's office and commercial market is currently oversaturated, so the property's lease and development likely will wait for an appropriate opportunity.
"Things might even go into a rest mode," Pfister said. That doesn't mean the heirs in favor of development have changed their minds, he said.
Jim Dille said he plans to seek schooling. It will be a fresh start for him, his wife, who works at Cub Foods, and their eight children, who range in age from 14 months to 18 years, he said.
"I want to show all the siblings how eight kids and their parents can work together," he said.
At 43, he said he may use his share of his inheritance to buy a farm far away from Sweet Arrow.
"I don't consider it my parents' farm anymore," Jim Dille said. "It's a war zone."
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