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After two years in limbo, the 357-acre Claude Moore Conservation Center in Sterling has been sold for $8.5 million to a Northern Virginia development company which plans to use the land for new housing.
Miller and Smith, a development firm from McLean, bought the property on Thursday, the day after the Board of Directors of the National Wildlife Federation voted 25-3 during its annual meeting in Seattle to sell the land, which it has used as a wildlife preserve and education center since Dr. Claude Moore donated the property to the federation in 1975.
Dr. Moore, who is 94 years old, will continue to live in his 254-year-old farmhouse on the property, which lies south of Route 7 next to Sterling Park. The deed guarantees not only his lifelong residence on the property, but also protects his house and road access from surrounding development.
Dr. Moore has fought sale and development of the property before, but he attended the national conference last week as an honorary president of the federation.
Charity gets estate
The estate of Robert Eugene and Virginia Fletcher Wood, an elderly Rappahannock County couple who died in 1979, has been divided equally between the Virginia Affiliate of the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society in a decision by the Virginia Supreme Court.
The court’s award ended six years of litigation over the estate, which is valued at $1.5 million to $2 million. The heirs of the Woods, the Medical College of Virginia and the University of Virginia had sought shares of the estate.
The couple drowned in 1979 when their car stalled on a bridge over the Thornton River during a flash flood.
Each left a handwritten will composed some 31 years earlier designating that half of their estate be left » to the “cancer fund” in Virginia. Mr. Wood also designated the “heart fund” as recipient of the remainder, except for some small gifts, but Mrs. Wood’s designation was to “the State of Virginia organization or Foundation engaged in research concerning ailments of the Heart and Heart Trouble.”
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