The price on the July 7, 1999 deed was $10. The price on the April 2025 deed for most of the same ground was about $10 million. Between those two numbers sit roughly 88 acres of Williamson County blackland east of Austin, a note about parkland written into the older instrument, and a planned data center of about 135,000 square feet in Taylor, Texas — a city that has spent the last four years rearranging itself around silicon. The chronology was pieced together in reporting by 404 Media, which walked the chain of title from a farmer’s nominal-fee conveyance to a limited liability company’s eight-figure purchase, and it is the chain, more than any single transaction, that makes the case unusual.
Taylor is not an accidental setting. The city sits northeast of Austin in Williamson County and has become one of the more heavily capitalized patches of Central Texas farmland, with the industrial ecosystem that follows large energy and chip projects: substations, water lines, fiber, and the low-slung windowless buildings that hold servers. Land that once traded on soil and rainfall now trades on megawatt access. The Bland tract is one parcel inside that conversion, distinguished mainly by what its original grantors wrote down.
A $10 deed with a sentence about parkland
The instrument recorded in the summer of 1999 conveyed approximately 87.97 acres — reported elsewhere as about 87.797 acres, depending on which survey call is cited — from members of the Bland family, including Bonnibel Bland Cromwell and relatives, to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation. The stated consideration was $10, the standard nominal figure used when a conveyance is functionally a gift and the parties still want a recital of value on the page.
The deed carried a note that the land was to be held in trust for future use as parkland for Williamson County. That phrasing, as Newsweek reported in its account of the dispute, is the hinge on which everything after 1999 turns. Deed language of this kind can operate in very different registers depending on how it is drafted: a recital of the grantor’s hopes, a covenant, or a condition with a reversion clause that snaps title back if the land is used otherwise. The difference is often a matter of a few words, and those few words are now the subject of argument.
Pamela Griffin, a neighbor who has become the most visible resident opponent of the project, has recalled a farmer she knew as Mr. Bland speaking to her father about what he wanted the ground to become — a park, not a subdivision, not industry. That recollection is hers, offered in the coverage as memory rather than as a document. What is documented is the $10, the acreage, the Bland-family names on the 1999 instrument, and the sentence about parkland.
The chain of title, in four moves
Nothing about the transfers that followed appears to have been done in the dark; they were recorded, which is why they can be traced now.
In 2003, the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation conveyed the property to the Williamson County Park Foundation, which conveyed it to the City of Taylor. In 2008, the city conveyed the tract to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation, the municipal entity that assembles and markets land for industrial recruitment — a category of quasi-public landholder that exists in Texas precisely to hold acreage until a project arrives.
The project arrived in April 2025, when the EDC sold to NCP Travis TPP Project LLC, an entity tied to the data-center developer Blueprint, for approximately $10 million. Tom’s Hardware, summarizing the arithmetic that has drawn national attention, framed it as a $10 gift converted into $10 million for a city government, with the city separately citing projected tax revenue over the next decade in the tens of millions — figures that are the city’s projections, not audited receipts.
The city has also said that the parkland note did not survive the 2003 chain — that later deeds in the sequence dropped the phrase. If accurate, that detail matters more than the sale price, because a restriction that does not appear in the operative conveyances is a restriction that later purchasers may never have had notice of.
Intent, restriction, and the acreage that is left
Daniel Seguin, Taylor’s executive director of community services, has characterized the parkland language as a statement of intent rather than an enforceable deed restriction — the city’s position, and one that has not been resolved as settled law in the public record so far. Residents read the same sentence as a trust obligation that traveled with the dirt.
That disagreement is currently moving through the courts rather than through the county clerk’s office. An initial case was dismissed on standing grounds, a request for a temporary injunction was denied, and an appeal is pending. None of that is a final answer, and the litigation should be read as unfinished.
The acreage deserves the same hedging. The 2025 sale covered most of the original tract, not necessarily every acre of it; reporting has put the Blueprint parcel in the range of 52 to 53 acres, with another portion previously going to a steel fabricator and the city retaining some buffer ground. The precise subdivision math belongs to the recorded plats, not to summary.
What is not in dispute is the bracket. In 1999, Bland-family descendants signed away roughly 88 acres for $10 with a line about parkland in the deed. In 2025, most of that same ground changed hands for about $10 million, and the buyer intends to build a data center on it.
