Now, West Marlborough eyebrows are arched anew over the arrival of a Forbes-certified billionaire - Richard A. Hayne, owner of the Urban Outfitters empire - and the emergence of a nearly 400-acre retirement compound that appears to be anything but retiring.
The work-in-progress already has given rise to expansive greenhouses and a cheese-making complex that, some neighbors fret, has an unsettling whiff of commerce.
What is Dick Hayne planning? Even township supervisors are wondering.
But whatever it is, he no doubt can afford it.
A longtime Chestnut Hill resident, Hayne, 63, occupies the No. 308 spot on Forbes magazine's latest list of American billionaires (up from No. 317 the previous year), with a net worth of $1.3 billion.
Although Hayne did not respond to The Inquirer's phone and e-mail requests for an interview, his real estate agent, Georgianna Hannum Stapleton, said his first choice of locale was not Chester County - already home to one billionaire, Campbell Soup heir Mary Alice Dorrance Malone. Acquiring a massive tract suitable for a man with a professed passion for farming, however, proved infeasible anywhere in the region but West Marlborough.
There, development is notable for its absence. Under township zoning, a new private property may be no smaller than 20 acres.
"We were fortunate to have so many foxhunters who required a lot of land," said Stapleton, one of fewer than 1,000 residents of a township carved out in 1729.
Still, for his 392.3 acres, Hayne had to cobble together three parcels, at an undisclosed total cost.
One was the 220-acre compound of the late Sir John Rupert Hunt Thouron, a celebrated horticulturist and philanthropist who sculpted his open fields into floral vistas. In 1976, while visiting America for its bicentennial, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him. He died in 2007 at 99.
