BIDDEFORD — The 31-acre field on Oak Ridge Road lies untouched, and now, it always will be.

The owner, Dana Hutchins, recently donated the property to the Saco Valley Land Trust.

When Hutchins was a boy, he remembers his father, George Emery Hutchins, planting potatoes in the field, he said as he looked across the expanse on a recent day.

At one time, the elder Hutchins planted beans there, beans he harvested and dried, destined for the bean suppers at the local volunteer fire department.

His grandfather, Arthur Hutchins, farmed this field and more acreage along the Biddeford end of Oak Ridge Road. He kept dairy cattle on the farm, which in all totaled 95 acres.

Dana Hutchins, who acquired the 31-acre field, said he wants to make sure it stays pristine, as it now is.

“I just want to protect the land,” said Hutchins. Now he said, it will stay as it was in his grandfather’s day.

Long a California resident, Hutchins, now 85, said living where he has since the mid-1970s, in the planned city of Irvine, helped him decide to donate the acreage back home. Irvine, he said, was planned to have a maximum of 100,000 residents — but despite the plan, the city has swelled to 300,000.

There has been growth locally, including in Biddeford — and a dizzying demand for housing, as evidenced by applications for subdivisions or other types of housing on Planning Board agendas in most York County municipalities.

While the stretch of Oak Ridge Road where the field is located remains rural at the moment, like some rural areas elsewhere, that could  change.

U.S. Census figures that measured growth from April 2020 to July 2021 showed the state’s population increased by about 10,000. According to a March 24 Portland Press Herald story by Edward Murphy, York County grew by 2,522 people. The county’s deaths outnumbered births by 848, but 3,370 people moved here from elsewhere — 96 from international locations and 3,274 from within the U.S.

The Saco Valley Land Trust has been preserving land, largely in Saco and Biddeford, since 1988. In all, 1,223 acres are protected by the trust, including 435 acres in conservation easements; the rest it owns, said trust President Richard Rhames.

“The trust has been successful as it has been, largely because of the generosity of donors like Dana, who have an emotional connection to the land,” Rhames said.

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