For more than 40 years, Betty and Wayne Schilling have taken on the dual challenge of running a farm and trying to stay one step ahead of the bulldozers as development enveloped their operation in southern Woodbury, one begun by Schilling's great-great grandfather a year before Minnesota became a state.
Last week, almost ominously, earth-moving equipment sat poised at the end of the quarter-mile long dirt driveway leading to their neatly kept farmstead. Soon, under the hypnotic drone of the auctioneer, everything that made the farm tick — well-used tools, tractors and tilling equipment, wooden egg crates, even the big steel grain bins and brick silos — would be sold off, the buyers departing with generations of memories as well as goods.
"It's not a funeral," Wayne Schilling said. "It's just a change of life."
Still, it was a day of wistful emotions for the Schillings, who were supported by their children and siblings who jointly own the farm's last 130 acres and who together came to the decision that this was the right time to sell.
Their farm is destined to become the site of St. Therese of Woodbury, a 307,000-square-foot senior housing complex that is part of Bielenberg Gardens, a mixed-use "urban village" that will include a grocery store, other retailers and housing at the southwest corner of Radio Drive and Bailey Road. That cluster of development, in turn, is part of an explosion of housing growth in some of the last open spaces in southern Woodbury emanating from the Bielenberg Sports Center/East Ridge High School complex just east of the Schilling farm.
Just as the Schillings are starting another chapter in their lives, the new development, which began in 2012 with the opening of what is known as Phase 2, marks the latest step in the city's rapid transformation from a rural township to the state's 10th-largest city in just a matter of decades. For years, the city has carefully managed the pace and location of its growth. So when tracts open up, developers pounce.
The city aims to add 600 housing units a year for the next decade in the area between Bailey Road and Cottage Grove, and new subdivisions are springing up. The South Washington County School District — which includes Cottage Grove, also undergoing housing growth — also is looking at long-range plans to meet the needs of that growing population.
The Schillings have been able to watch the changes from their kitchen window.