CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Hall Family Farm, located on Providence Rd. W. in Ballantyne has been sold.
“The family, which is my six aunts and uncles and my father, sold the farm here on Providence Road [West] earlier this month to Novant Health,” said owner Kevin Hall, whose been running the farm with his wife since 2011.
The land has been in the Hall family since 1914.
In 2011, when Hall’s grandfather passed away, he and his wife made the farm operational, inviting visitors to pick strawberries every spring and pumpkins every fall. For the last eight years, families have flocked to the farm.
In the fall, families could partake in all that fall on a farm had to offer, from hay rides behind a tractor to warm doughnuts. Some might say it’s provided Charlotteans a ‘down on the farm’ break from the hustle and bustle of the city sprawling all around it.
But this fall will mark the farm’s last. Like many Charlotte staples, Hall Family Farm will also give way to new development.
Earlier this month, the 37-acre farm was sold to Novant Health for $21 million.
“We live here, we experience the traffic, the congestion and understood that adding more apartment complexes or townhouses would not help the community in any way,” Hall said.
Hall said he was able to lease the land back from Novant for the remainder of 2019.
“So, we do have a strawberry season coming up, that should be starting maybe around April 10th to the 15th," Hall said. "Things are looking really good, the plants are healthy, the weather is finally starting to cooperate. And then we’ll have one final pumpkin season."
But even though the farm in Ballantyne has sold, Hall says he and his wife have plans to open a new farm, just 14 miles south near Van Wyck, South Carolina.
He says the new farm will be roughly eight times larger than the current one at 270 acres.
In addition to all of the Hall Family Farm favorites families have come to know, Hall says the new farm will also feature miles of walking trails, a six-acre lake and an actual train, which will run on a track roughly a mile long.
“We’ve spent the last two years working on it, getting it ready," Hall said. "We’re nowhere near finished yet, but we have a lot planned for it.”
He hopes to have the new farm ready for visitors by 2021.
As for Novant’s plans for the land, the healthcare giant says they plan to build a new 161,000 square foot hospital on the land -- with an expected investment of $154 million. They say they hospital will include 36 beds, two operating rooms, and a dedicated C-section OR.
While Novant now owns the land, they do have a few small hurdles to get through before they’re able to begin construction on the new hospital, including an application approval from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human services and a rezoning request from the city.
Novant says once approved, they hope to complete construction by 2023, making healthcare more accessible to south Charlotte residents.
“Novant Health is committed to improving the health of our communities throughout Mecklenburg County and beyond," Roland Bibeau, President and COO of Novant Health Matthews Medical Center said in a statement to NBC Charlotte. "In order to deliver on this commitment, we must ensure acute care resources expand to reach our growing suburban populations. Simply put, we must meet patients where they are."
The statement continues to say that a hospital in south Charlotte would make services more accessible or convenient for residents.
"Based on the success of our other community hospitals, we believe this hospital will improve the quality of, and access to, care in southern Mecklenburg County," the statement says.