How taxpayers raised $20 million to beat developers and turn Crebilly Farm into a park

Three Robinson brothers, immigrants from Ulster, Ireland, cofounded Acme Markets in 1917 and built what became for a time the Delaware Valley’s largest grocery chain.

Like other wealthy families, the Robinsons plowed a slice of the profits into comfortable family estates in the gentle hills west of the city — Glencoe in Radnor Township, Nawbeek (including Rock Hill Farm) in Willistown and Easttown, and Crebilly in Westtown and Thornbury.

At their largest, the family’s real estate holdings covered more than two square miles, about the combined size of West Chester and Media.

Their sons sold Acme in 1979. Their grandchildren over the next few decades sold or donated the family properties, and mostly left the state.

Now grandson David Robinson is selling the last of the family’s Pennsylvania acres — a half-square mile of Crebilly, south of West Chester, with its pastures and former cornfields, white-walled show-horse and cattle barns, houses of native green serpentine stone, and a springhouse rebuilt as a chapel after a tree fell on it.

Robinson says he’s “blown away” by the $100,000 an acre — $20.8 million — that his family is collecting for the two-thirds of the property, which will become a Westtown Township park.

That price “came in close to the appraisal” and higher than private developers offered, Robinson said during an interview in the wood-beamed, high-ceilinged living room of the family home that he and his wife will soon vacate.

The remaining 104 acres, split into four large lots — mini-estates, with conservation easements limiting construction — are on the market separately. Robinson says he expects they’ll sell soon: “There’s been a lot of interest.”

It took two years for the township and its open-space allies to raise the money to turn the heart of Crebilly into a park — far faster than private developers who coveted the ground were able to move, Robinson said. He had negotiated with a series of developers, most recently Horsham-based Toll Bros., to build hundreds of homes on the site.

But those talks dragged on for years in the face of local opposition. Specialists who help landowners arrange conservation tax breaks in areas with well-organized resident and open-space advocacy groups now enjoy a “competitive advantage” over the slow-moving local-government machinery needed to approve private development, said Jack Stefferud, senior director for land protection at Media-based nonprofit Natural Lands.

Stefferud and his Natural Lands colleagues and allies helped Westtown supervisor Richard Pomerantz and other local officials and conservationists assemble the purchase price and rally taxpayer support.

Funds raised to “Save Crebilly,” as supporters urged, include:

Crebilly was one of the last farms in that stretch of the U.S. 202 corridor available for preservation, said Natural Lands’ Stefferud, as he joined Robinson for a walking tour of the property in early December.

He said the park has been a popular cause among Westtown and Chester County elected officials, reflecting local residents’ support.

“I really feel everyone is a winner here,” Stefferud said, adding that Robinson’s “patience in all of this has been unending.”

It could have ended another way. Since the 1980s, Robinson had negotiated with a string of would-be developers to build hundreds of homes on the site, just as his family sold Crebilly’s Thornbury half to developers in 1997.

The Robinsons came close to selling Crebilly’s Westtown core in the early 1990s and the late 2000s after years of township review and litigation. But the process took so long, the eventual approvals failed to coincide with favorable peaks in the housing market cycle, and the plans expired.

In 2016 Toll Bros., the national developer based in Horsham, submitted a plan to buy Crebilly and build hundreds of single-family and attached homes and apartments.

Robinson’s decision to sell to Toll infuriated neighbors, who packed meetings and signed petitions demanding that the elected supervisors oppose dense new housing. One opponent rode horseback door to door collecting signatures to underline residents’ attachment to the ideal of country living in rapidly suburbanizing Chester County, the wealthiest of the state’s 67 counties.

”They thought we were the worst people in the world,” recalled Robinson, smiling.

After a court fight and appeals, Robinson said Toll’s ”very professional” approach finally cleared the way for construction — just in time for the pandemic to stall U.S. home building once again. Toll let its deal with Robinson expire in 2021, as the pandemic idled builders.

That’s when Natural Lands stepped in, offering to help find money to buy Crebilly.

Westtown leaders figured they could harness the anti-developer passion and persuaded voters in 2022 to approve a pair of tax increases to help fund the deal. The extra property tax will cost homeowners an average of $105 more a year. The local earned-income tax will rise by $80 per $100,000 of income, according to a six-page information sheet the township sent residents at the time.

Robinson said the neighbors now treat him like a hero. The township has begun planning for “passive” recreation, such as hiking trails. It does not plan any athletic fields.