Photo by Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Louise and George Kegley live in a house known as Monterey, which they believe could become a museum one day.

Photo by Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

George and Louise Kegley lease a pasture bordering Tinker Creek to a farmer who keeps about 50 head of beef cattle there.

Louise and George Kegley are thinking long term.

"Five hundred years down the road, there won't be a subdivision here," George Kegley said last week of the 116-acre farm where he and his wife live in Northeast Roanoke.

The reason is a perpetual conservation, historic preservation and open-space easement they have created for the property, a first in the city.

The Kegleys, whose property is adjacent to Read Mountain, live on one of the last two large farm tracts in the city. The other, comprising two parcels totaling approximately 80 acres, is commonly known as the Ellett farm on Brandon Avenue Southwest.

The Kegleys' property includes a historic home built about 1845 known as "Monterey." One of the two golf courses that border the property was named after it.

The final legal paperwork for the easement is scheduled to be filed early this week.

The property is near, but not contiguous to, two large tracts on Read Mountain in Roanoke County that were placed under easement restrictions earlier this year.

"Read Mountain is really prominent from their property," said Josh Gibson, an easement specialist for the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, the state agency that holds the Kegleys' easement with the state Board of Historic Resources.

"Before I went out there, I never would have known it existed," Gibson said of the farm. "You can stand in a hayfield in Roanoke city and see downtown, Mill Mountain and the Roanoke star. It's really a unique place for the city."

The easement doesn't transfer ownership of the property, but it will bind the Kegleys, their heirs or anyone who ever buys the property from subdividing it for residential development or building a shopping center.

Because the family believes the Monterey house might one day become a museum, the easement does allow for the possible construction of a small kiosk to be used with a museum, and for one additional house on a designated section of the property for an heir or a caretaker.

It also allows for the creation of "wind and/or solar power structures for generating electrical energy or pumping water for farm and ... domestic use on the property."

Otherwise it generally must remain farmland and forested acreage.

According to the easement deed, the property is a segment of a 2,000-acre tract "once owned by Col. William Fleming, a surgeon, military and community leader who, as a senior member of the Council of Virginia served as Acting Governor for a short period in 1781."

Another early owner was Yelverton Neal Oliver, postmaster of the village of Big Lick in 1831, who is believed to have built the Greek Revival Monterey. The Read family bought the property soon after that and continued living there for more than a century.

Louise Kegley acquired the property in 1969.

In her letter seeking the Virginia Outdoors Foundation's assistance in creating the easement, Kegley wrote that, "When I bought the farm from Emma Read Oppenheimer almost 40 years ago, she said she had looked for a buyer who would keep the property as farmland as it had been for close to two centuries.

"We have rented the pasture for a small beef cattle operation and we have planted trees and tried to preserve the land in an environmental way. We want the green, open space to remain as it is."

She recalled that her husband and their four children enjoyed working in a garden there, picking berries and enjoying nature.

"My family and I want to protect our farm and home from the development which is occurring all around us. ... We do not want this to be another subdivision or commercial site."

The idea of conservation easements dates back about 125 years, but they really took hold in the past half-century as pressures on open space intensified. At the same time, Virginia and the federal government began granting tax incentives for people to give up all future rights to develop property that was being preserved in agricultural or natural states.

The Kegleys also have applied for assistance through the Blue Ridge Soil and Water Conservation District, which Roanoke joined only two years ago, to help finance a buffer to keep pollution from Tinker Creek, which forms the southeastern boundary of the property.

They lease a pasture bordering the creek to a farmer who keeps about 50 head of beef cattle there. A condition of the easement is to build a barrier at least 35 feet away from the creek to keep livestock out.

The conservation district will also help with construction of a well to provide water to the cattle.

Conservation-easement rules "encourage pasture land for livestock," said George Kegley, a longtime employee of The Roanoke Times. And future uses could include "almost any kind of gardens, orchards, a tree farm."

"We just want to keep it green. That's the way we feel about it."