Unwinding Jordan Hollow Farm Inn

This is the last of three posts this week meant to help me get caught up on the vacation week that Mary and I spent at Hawksbill Cabin in late May.  I still have a few left, but won’t put them up until next week at the earliest.

Back in 2010, the locally famous Jordan Hollow Farm Inn finally succumbed to a combination of the bad economy and some bad business decisions by the owners, and it went into foreclosure.  Somewhere in the history of this blog, a reader might find a few photos of the property back then, as Mary and I took a couple of looks at it while we tried to decide if we might make a play for it at the foreclosure auction.

At the time, the bank was sticking with a price that was just too high.  I ran some proformas and simply couldn’t find a way to make the old inn work with the mortgage that would be required – so we passed on it.  We met a lot of good local people during our due diligence, and we got to spend some time with a few good friends who could offer insight into the wisdom of the venture, so I count the whole experience as a win

Eventually the price came down to almost half of what the bank originally sought.  The moment had passed for us, but the price was too good for the property to sit for much longer and a new buyer appeared.  Now we’ve been watching the place with great interest as a lot of improvements have been made under the new trade name of ‘Hawksbill Hideaway.’

A couple of weekends ago, there was an auction of some of the personal property at the place – I guess you’d call that the final unwinding of the old inn.  The event was just packed, but after having benefitted from a couple of up close and personal looks at all the items that were up for auction, there really wasn’t anything that Mary and I could use, or would likely bid on.

That is, except for two items – the old signs for the inn.  I’d used a modified PowerPoint version of one of them on my business plan when Mary and I were looking at the place. They’d been tucked away in the old barn gathering dust; I saw them on one of my old walk-throughs, but I had completely forgotten about them. 

We stopped by the auction briefly on our way back from the farmers market, just as the crowd was moving to the vehicles and lawn care equipment.  We walked around looking at the flotsam and jetsam of what had been a popular local spot a couple of decades ago, sorry to see it coming to an end like that.

Then I spotted a lady moving the signs around.  She’s picked them up for less than $50 for both.  I chatted with her a bit, and told me she had taken riding lessons at the inn when she was a youngster, so having the signs around her farm was going to be a nice memory.

I agreed, and told her they probably were the only things I might have been interested in, too, but that I was glad to hear they were going to a place like hers where they would be appreciated.

And then I helped her load them into her car.