M. Night Shyamalan bought a Chester County farm owned by the Rockefeller family for $24M
Conservationists in Willistown Township, Chester County were alarmed when the 200-acre Kirkwood Farm went on the market last January. But they see the new owner as a steward, not a developer.
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A company traced to an address used by M. Night Shyamalan, writer and director of The Sixth Sense and Knock at the Cabin, has paid $24 million for a 210-acre Chester County property that was associated with generations of the Rockefeller family.
Public records show that Woodkirk LLC sold the Kirkwood Farm on Providence Road in Willistown Township to 944 Providence Road LLC for $24 million on March 14.
The registered address for 944 Providence LLC is on Campus Boulevard in Newtown Square. That is the same address used by the M. Night Shyamalan Foundation Inc., the famed director’s charitable organization.
Shyamalan, who grew up in suburban Philadelphia, could not be reached for comment. He and his family live in Willistown on an estate called Ravenwood.
Conservationists who had feared hundreds of houses would be developed on the Willistown Township site known as Kirkwood Farm are relieved.
“The sale is going to have a conservation-minded outcome,” said Kate Etherington, executive director of the Willistown Conservation Trust. “Kirkwood Farm is not being sold to a developer. And we’re thrilled.”
Kim Whetzel and Ellen Hass of Kurfiss Sotheby’s International Realty’s Chestnut Hill office were the agents for the buyer, whom they declined to identify.
“The new owners are thrilled to be the next stewards of Kirkwood Farm,” Whetzel and Hass said in a joint statement.
A rolling landscape of fields and woods in the center of Willistown — an 18-square mile community of 11,000 — the Kirkwood Farm was listed for $29.9 million, sales agent Lavinia Smerconish said.
Advertisements by Compass real estate described a property that was available “for the first time in 90 years” and offered “endless views” punctuated only by “five charming residences, two barns, a pond, a stream, and spring house.”
Smerconish said the property was sold by descendants of William Rockefeller Jr. who along with his brother, John D. Rockefeller, founded the Standard Oil company in 1870. The farm has belonged to generations of the Rockefeller family and in recent years has been used by members of a hunting club. The farmhouses have been rented to tenants, and two remain occupied, she said.
Public records show the property was associated with Almira R. Scott, daughter of William G. Rockefeller, once treasurer of Standard Oil. Notably, it was also associated with Hardie Scott, a former Republican U.S. representative who married into the Rockefeller family. Scott died in 1999 and appointed M. Roy Jackson, also a scion of the Rockefellers, and the Glenmede Trust Co., as executors. Jackson was a grandson of William Rockefeller Jr., who died in 1922.
Etherington declined to say whether the trust had been involved in discussions with Kirkwood Farm’s new owner, whom she declined to identify.
Like similar organizations elsewhere in Pennsylvania and beyond, the Conservation Trust pursues paid agreements with owners of large, environmentally sensitive, or otherwise significant tracts of open space to place permanent conservation easements on their properties to protect them from major development in perpetuity.
The Trust has protected about 7,500 acres of privately owned land in Willistown in the last 20 years. These include the 100-acre Kirkwood Preserve, which had once been part of the larger Kirkwood Farm property.