For about as long as roads have led travelers through the Whitemarsh Valley, vast, rolling pastures and crop fields have distinguished the hillsides just outside Philadelphia's northwest border. The 426 acres of Erdenheim Farm have endured the centuries as open, agricultural space, an artifact of William Penn's era still alive and green amid a sea of suburbs. In their time, colonial grantees, plantation owners, and Gilded Age millionaires each had a hand in this legacy, though it became threatened when longtime owner F. Eugene "Fitz" Dixon died in 2006. Developers looked at the prime tracts and saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move in and build. That, however, likely has passed. Tomorrow, if a 10-way real estate deal for an unspecified sum goes through as painstakingly negotiated over the last decade, Erdenheim Farm's status will be locked in: farmland in perpetuity, its future the same as its past.

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