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Part of Buffington estate goes on the auction block Saturday
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A tract of the Buffington property near Harmony Church Road is set for auction Saturday. Part of the estate of Sonny Buffington will be sold to the highest bidder. - photo by Scott Rogers | The Times
The way his daughters remember it, the late Sonny Buffington maybe left his East Hall farm twice, taking one trip to Canada and another to Florida in a span of some 65 years.“My father — this was his life — that’s all he did was farm, and it definitely was a 24/7 occupation,” said daughter Beth Buffington Weikel.The trip to Canada was to see other farming operations. And Sonny Buffington spent the rest of his life lording over some 1,500 acres of grazing cattle and broilers mostly, though at some point or other, he raised dogs, hogs and horses.“You name it, we’ve had a little of it,” Weikel said.Since their father’s death six years ago, Weikel and her sister Ginger Buffington Folger have, for the most part, taken on the family business, producing about a quarter-million broiler hens every nine weeks on a fifth-generation farm.But as two sisters with careers of their own and with children who have plans that will lead them beyond the farm, they will say goodbye to nearly 530 acres of the Buffington family’s legacy this weekend in a sale some say might be the biggest large-scale real estate auction in the county’s recent history.The family is using a national auction house, the J.P. King Auction Co., to facilitate the auction of more than a third of their father’s land, which has been broken into 33 parcels for the sale. J.P. King specializes in high-end and luxury properties, said Caley King Newberry, the company’s communications manager.