The Haymount real estate development in Caroline County, Virginia has had more starts and stops than rush-hour traffic on the Capital Beltway.

It has been nearly 15 years since the project's conception. But within a few months, workers might begin building the roads, water lines and other infrastructure required for the proposed 1,800-acre townlike development on the Rappahannock River.

John A. Clark, the driving force behind Haymount, said he has received a $14 million revolving loan from GMAC Residential Funding that, along with other financing, is moving the project forward.

Clark and his team met with Caroline officials Thursday to discuss the project. The developer has still to finalize site and subdivision plans and utility agreements. The land was rezoned for the development in 1992.
   

Haymount, the historical name for the farm on which Clark plans to build his development, is slated to include 4,000 residential units, 250,000 square feet of retail space, neighborhood parks, a farmers' market, a college campus and an elementary school. Plans call for the construction of five distinct neighborhoods in three phases.

"Physical construction will begin next spring," Clark said during a recent tour of the property, which is now mostly trees and soybean fields. He said if everything goes right, the first homeowners could be moving in within 15 months.

Haymount sits among other large farms in an oxbow of the Rappahannock, about 20 minutes south of Fredericksburg east of U.S. 17. It is a few miles northwest of the historic river hamlet of Port Royal, a bustling port in the 19th-century, near where Union troops captured President Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Haymount is designed to be environmentally friendly, but to get to this point, Clark has had to get by opposition from neighbors and environmentalists, a disapproving county commission, economic recession and court challenges to the rezoning.

Suzanne Stepp, whose family has owned the farm bordering Haymount on the north for 125 years, unsuccessfully fought the rezoning for Clark's development but says she no longer has any axes to grind. She is resigned to the county's decision to approve the development.

"It's done and put to bed," she said.

But Stepp, whose home is within a few dozen feet of the largest of the planned Haymount neighborhoods, said she will miss the rural atmosphere that the development will alter. Her part of the world is both 70 miles from the White House and in the middle of nowhere, she said.

Clark, 56 and a sixth-generation Washingtonian, first saw Haymount a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving 1988. As a developer, he had been inspired by Seaside, a planned community in Florida, and looked for a place to do something similar.

Gene Clore, a Fredericksburg real estate agent, showed him a piece of property west of town, but it wasn't what Clark was looking for. Clore then mentioned that he had a friend in Caroline with a farm to sell.

"I . . . fell in love with the place," Clark said.

Clark likes to mention that people have lived on the site of Haymount since 5,000 B.C. The farm's more recent history, however, can be traced to a grant from the King of England to a man named Moon, who turned it into an outlying plantation that was occupied by Moon's slaves and their overseers.

To pursue his plans for Haymount, Clark took on the W.C. & A.N. Miller Co. of Washington as a financial partner. With that real estate company's backing, he formed the Haymount Limited Partnership to buy the property. Clark then retained Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who had designed Seaside in Florida, to create a plan for the new development.

Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. has since come to be recognized as one of the leaders in an architectural movement called new urbanism or neo-traditionalism. It's a movement whose antithesis is suburban sprawl.

Clark also called on other advocates of sustainable, earth-friendly planning to work on the Haymount plan. The planning process was open to all, including the project's opponents.

One of those Clark consulted early on was Bill Browning, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute's Green Development Services Group. Browning studied environmental design at the University of Colorado and real estate development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an emphasis on town planning and solar architecture. He also worked with R. Buckminster Fuller, the legendary inventor of the geodesic dome.

Browning recently returned to his native Virginia to work full time on the development of Haymount, while retaining the title of senior fellow at Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo. His design clients over the years have ranged from the Sydney Olympics to the White House to LucasFilm.

Browning said new urbanism is about looking at the ways that older communities were designed. "Something we've forgotten how to do is make streets . . . and neighborhoods," he said. Streets should form rooms, too.

Localities that use bigger lots to control growth are taking the wrong approach, Browning said. With big-lot subdivisions, localities end up with hundreds of houses that cost about the same.

That will not be true of Haymount, Clark said. Children as well as their parents can live in the same community because of the wide range (from 800 to 3,600 square feet) of housing that will be available for sale.

Among the housing choices will be condominiums in buildings disguised as single-family homes and "live-work" buildings, where Clark envisions people, some older but not yet ready to retire, having a business and a home.

Another goal is that no residence would be more than a five-minute walk from a corner store or cafe. Houses gradually will get more yard space as streets move away from neighborhood centers. The use of automobiles will be downplayed. Each home will come with two bicycles, and Clark plans a shuttle service so that residents commuting to Washington will not have to drive to the train station at Fredericksburg.

A large part of the Haymount farm, including a wetlands area and most of the river frontage, will not be developed and will be placed under a conservation easement, Clark said. The river bank at the north end of the property that will be developed will be turned into a public park.

One day recently, as Clark showed visitors the river, a bald eagle, its markings unmistakable even some 200 yards away, flew gracefully along the opposite bank.

Greg Edwards is a staff writer with the Richmond Times Dispatch.