By the time Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger left office in 2022, officials knew the nearly 2,100-acre McDonald Farm he urged the county to buy for $16 million for manufacturing purposes was either largely unsuited for manufacturing or would cost an exorbitant amount to retrofit for that purpose.
The ball was squarely in the hands of new Mayor Weston Wamp, who looked upon the land as a challenge, not as a pig in a poke.
“I never have said it was a bad idea,” he told us in 2025. “I’ve just tried to be transparent with the public. It’s prohibitively expensive” to develop, he said, “so we’ve tried to find a different way to look at this — something that’s in everybody’s best interest.”
That “something” was revealed Friday when state officials joined Wamp to announce the proposed creation of a new state park, which would encompass 800 acres of McDonald Farm in Hamilton County and 500 in Rhea County, land that would be conveyed to the state. Hamilton County would retain approximately another 800 acres of the original 2,100, including the homestead and county fair site, as a county park.
It would be the Tennessee’s 70th state park, the 14th created under Gov. Bill Lee. The first one in the state was Harrison Bay State Park, also in Hamilton County.