Before emerging AS A MAJOR REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER IN HARRISONBURG DURING THE 1970s and playing an integral role in JMU's CISAT expansion in the '90s, as well as contributing a $1.3 million in-kind gift to the university last year, Bill Neff once had a lone buffalo, a bull. He got it after participating in a local turkey-shoot. When the snorting, explosive beast was delivered, Neff stuck it out on a vacant 80-acre farm east of town along U.S. 33 that he had recently purchased. There the buffalo roamed free.
Many townsfolk wondered about Neff.
What amused them, perhaps more than the buffalo, was the fact that Neff had paid top dollar -- around $5,000 per acre -- for the farm it inhabited. But Neff, buffalo aside, had a vision and a stubborn will to see it through. It began in 1956 soon after he returned home to Rockingham County after military service and started selling mobile homes.
To fully appreciate that vision's prescience and Neff's impact on Harrisonburg, it helps to step back in time. The best vantage point is just behind Hillcrest, the home of then-Madison College President G. Tyler Miller. Face east, looking out over the college's untouched back campus.
Here's the view: The creek and the railroad tracks at the base of Bluestone Hill, and a short distance beyond them the fresh incision of a newly paved Interstate 81, running level and straight, with occasional traffic streaking by. Beyond it, nothing but fenced pastures, scattered farm houses, barns, silos and wooded hilltops stretching away toward the base of Massanutten Peak.
Now turn just a wee bit to the northeast. There -- that's Neff's base of operations: a mobile trailer office, stuck out in the middle of a field, set way back from a winding two-lane U.S 33. Far from the commercial heart of downtown Harrisonburg, Bill Neff waits. All alone out there like some lone buffalo.
Townsfolk wonder.
"What in the hell are you doing with an office
sitting there?" Neff today recalls them asking. "I'd say, 'Well,
it's only a matter of time.'" His gruff, vintage drawl continues:
"Everybody from the city was telling all the people who came to
town that everything was going south to development, and I was
telling
the people it's not going to happen that way!"
It was a simple enough insight: The U.S 33 interchange on I-81 is the only one in Harrisonburg where traffic can flow east-west. The corridor's lucrative future, according to Neff, was determined once the state converted 33 to four lanes. That was completed soon after the city's I-81 segment (the first section of the interstate to be built nationally, says Neff). Business was bound to follow. "I knew the city was wrong, and I told the city, I told them the plan: 'Within 20 years that 33-east corridor is going to be larger than downtown Harrisonburg.'"
"As a result of that, I started buying property, 'cause I knew," he says. He bought the real estate in increments, using the profits he made from sales of mobile homes, until he eventually owned an expanse of land from Country Club Road (the original U.S. 33) to today's Edith J. Carrier Arboretum, roughly 2,000 acres in all.
Still, there was more to it than just purchasing the land. To divert the commercial herding of development to the city's south side, Neff began purchasing property there and raising the price. Meanwhile, he set out some water. At great personal expense, he connected the land along 33 to the city's public water and sewer lines. By the latter half of the '70s, corporate developers began looking east at Neff's farmland. K-Mart. Kroger. Then Valley Mall, he says, which was one of the top 10 largest malls in the country at the time.
The buffalo had to be moved. So, too, did its farm.
To seal the deal for the mall's site, Neff told the buyer that he would level the land to the corporation's desired elevation. According to Neff, they just couldn't see it until he showed the mall folk that he could sell them the land with the hill removed, leaving enough space for the structure and its copious parking needs. Neff wanted the dirt anyway, a mountain of it -- which he created -- for filling in that southwesterly quarter of lowland that swept back toward the interstate and JMU, where president Ronald Carrier now resided in Hillcrest, planning an arboretum and envisioning an east campus across the interstate.
The mall went up, becoming a robust commercial success, boosted by a steadily growing and seasonal influx of JMU students and their families. The city, having annexed Neff's land from Rockingham County, also appreciated the promising and expanding retail tax base that Neff's gradually materializing dream was providing. As a revenue source, it damped down the city's property taxes, an attractive feature of Harrisonburg that continues today, according to Brian Shull, the city's director of economic development.
Still, there was Neff's "Mud Mountain," as it came to be called, dominating the landscape behind the mall. Many townsfolk didn't understand, including one member of the city council who waged a successful election campaign publicly complaining about it. Neff remained unperturbed by the criticism.
"I knew what to do with the dirt," he says. Truckload by truckload he redistributed "Mud Mountain" elsewhere on his land, as it was sold off to investors, all the while drawing commercial development closer to JMU.
The university, meanwhile, under Carrier, pushed out across the interstate. A convocation center. A beautiful student recreation facility. An arboretum. Before long, JMU and Neff were converging over the same land. As Carrier began formulating his ideas about CISAT, he knew he needed Neff.
And Neff came through.
"He calls me about 11 o'clock one morning back in the early '90s and he says, 'Ron, I want to talk to you about this piece of property‚” Carrier recalls. Carrier summoned then vice president and current President Linwood H. Rose and one of the school’s trusted financial supporters, Zane Showker. The three met Neff at the site. Neff, chewing tobacco, rolled a plat out on the hood of his car. It revealed the 100 acres of land Neff was brokering for another landowner and on which CISAT now sits. “Bill, we’d really like to have the land, but we don’t have any money,” Carrier said.
Neff responded that he had an eager developer
interested in the land, yet he really wanted the university to have it. Carrier
and Rose needed time to secure the cash from donors and the General Assembly.
So Carrier proposed to Neff that he hold the land in reserve for six to eight
months, buying the university time, for which favor it would pay $100,000. Neff
agreed. Carrier next asked Neff if he would commit $50,000 for that purpose.
Neff agreed, again. Showker then did the same, at
Carrier’s request, for the remaining $50,000.
“Lin Rose and I went up there
and had not a nickel and walked away with a commitment to hold the land with
their money,” says Carrier. “That was Bill Neff, and that’s why we have that
land, because he was willing to do that.”
Rose elaborates. “Today that land is home to the
Neff, who laughs at the story, is positive about the
longstanding relationship he and Neff Enterprises have had with JMU, both as a
friend and business partner. “We’ve very often done things on a handshake, with
no contract, no nothing. They’ve always lived up to everything they’ve said,
and we certainly have too.”
Longtime colleagues describe Neff as just that kind of
businessman, for whom a handshake is enough. “Bill Neff is one of the few
people I know that I feel comfortable with and don’t need a contract. His word
is his bond,” says former
A hands-on, no-frills (there is no computer at his
desk, and his secretary still uses an electric typewriter) entrepreneur, Neff
is guided by an abiding Methodist faith. He contributes 10 percent of his
income to various local charities and institutions, including JMU. “We have the
best country in the world, no question about that, but the only way we can
continue that is through education,” he says.
Recently he sold the university Blue Ridge Hall at a
$1.3 million reduction off the market price. The building, which Neff
originally built and leased to the university as a residence hall, is adjacent
to the campus, across from Costco. Given Neff’s original investment in the
land, his gift to JMU has provided him a substantial tax break on the
appreciated land value. That’s something Neff the businessman relishes and
recommends to others. “My gift didn’t cost me what I gave,” he explains. “That
$1.3 million didn’t come right out of my pocket, but it does come off my taxes.
I think that kind of gift arrangement should appeal to other businessmen and
farmers and landowners. It’s smart business, and it benefits education.”
In addition to his in-kind contribution from the sale of the building, Neff has pledged $100,000 to the university, making his combined gift of $1.4 million among the largest that JMU has received to date.
“We don’t own anything on this earth,” says Neff, about his philanthropy. “The good Lord owns it all, anything that’s material — I don’t care whether it’s a vehicle or building — it’s going to nothing,” he adds. “You must give back; you can’t try to keep stuff and horde it.”
He leans back in his squeaky desk chair, sitting in his mobile office on the Neff Auto Sales lot on University Boulevard (which he built), at the center of Harrisonburg’s commercial labyrinth (that he started), now some of the city’s most valuable real estate. As the crow flies, Neff, is barely a half-mile from that original pasture where he began selling mobile homes, when many people were questioning his entrepreneurial sense of direction.
And what about that lone buffalo?
It turned out to be sterile. So, Neff, on a whim, while
vacationing with his family in
Story by Randy Jones
Photos by Diane Elliot (’00)