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By JOHN EISENHARD
and LINDA B. KINES
Arundel Newspapers
In August 1976, a 596-acre farm south of Leesburg, Va., was sold for $1,075,000. The buyers: a Belgian couple.
In September 1976, a 226-acre estate south of Remington, Va., was sold for $400,000. The buyers: a contractor from Hamburg, West Germany, and a German baroness and her two children.
A survey by Arundel Newspapers of a three-year period, 1975-78, has identified 15 such transfers to foreign nationals of farms and estates in a five-county Virginia Piedmont area ranging from Loudoun to Orange.
Some native Americans view the phenomenon with fear. Even before a government survey for an 18month period revealed that 826,543 acres of 25 million sold nationwide had been acquired by foreigners, the US Congress passed and the President signed a law requiring the disclosure of the identity and country-of-citizenship of the buyers. About 30 states have also enacted regulations, ranging from disclosure of sales—like the law the Virginia General Assembly adopted last month—to limitations on the acreage, to an outright ban on such sales. The New York Times reported last year that Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Oklahoma had barred non-resident aliens from holding land in those states. Newsweek magazine mentioned Mississippi and Minnesota as states banning sales of farmland to foreign nationals.
Some Limit Acreage
Iowa and Wisconsin imposed a 640-acre limit on the sales, Newsweek reported. Missouri has a five-acre limitation, the kind which the Maryland Assembly considered last month.
During the debate in February in Virginia’s House of Delegates, Ray
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