Beneath an expansive blue sky, Georgia Fry gave a quick tour of the Washington Boro farm that used to be hers.

Exposed stonework at the rear of the fading brick farmhouse reveals its age. "Part of the house was built 200 years ago," said Fry. "I have pictures of it before my parents bought the farm 60 years ago."

At the top of a hill is an empty hog barn where she once kept as many as 250 sows. And to the north, a tractor rolls over loose, dark-brown earth. A tenant is farming this field, paying money not to Fry but to the neighbor who now owns the land.

Fry lawsuit document

Fry said she never meant to give up the family farm. But in in 2005, facing mounting debts, she considered selling the land.

It was then, according to a lawsuit filed late last month, that a neighbor stepped forward and said he wanted to help.

The lawsuit, filed April 30 in the Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas, alleges that Fry's neighbor, Marvin D. Slaymaker, of Washington Boro, offered to buy the farm and lease it back to her. She would have the right to repurchase the farm for a period of five years.

Fry, trusting in her neighbor, agreed. But two years later, she fell behind on the monthly lease payment. Slaymaker then offered to "do her a favor," according to the complaint: He would drop the monthly payment. Fry signed a new agreement — one that, unbeknownst to her, according to the lawsuit, stripped her of the right to repurchase the farm.

In addition, according to the complaint, Slaymaker then filed legal paperwork declaring an interest in Fry's "equipment, fixtures, accounts, inventory, instruments, documents" and more.

"Not only does [Slaymaker] come away with the farm," said Len Brown, of Clymer Musser Brown & Conrad, the attorney who is representing Fry, "he comes away with everything she owns other than the contents of the house."

Slaymaker and his attorney declined comment, both saying they had not seen the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, as new tenants plow the fields once belonging to her, Georgia Fry hunkers down in the old brick farmhouse, at the end of her rope. With little money and no income, her phone was recently turned off; there was virtually no money for heating oil this past winter.

"I didn't want to go this route, I've never taken anybody to court or anything like that," said Fry. "But I'm almost 60 years old, and this farm was my retirement. I worked all my life, I don't have a pension.

"I don't have anything."

Standing offer
Once, Georgia Fry could have had a nice, stable retirement.

Neighbors say she had had a long-standing offer from a nearby farmer who was prepared to pay as much as $1.3 million for her hilly, 87-acre parcel off Prospect Road.

"He'd been trying to buy that farm for 10 years," said another neighbor who asked that his name not be used. "She should have cashed out and given [farming] up. But she wanted to keep farming. She's stubborn."

In addition to the hogs, Fry grew tobacco and rented out some of the land to other farmers.

Fry grew up at the farm and, with the exception of a four-year spell before she married in 1971, she lived there all her life. She and then-husband Larry began working the land the year they married. They divorced in 1995; he died in a 2005 car crash.

Three of their four children live out of state; her youngest son had thought he might one day want to work on the farm. "But when all this began to happen," Fry said, "he went and got another job."

It all "began to happen" around 2003, when, according to the lawsuit, the price of feed for her hogs rose, and the value of the hogs and her tobacco crops fell precipitously.

She declared bankruptcy, but voluntarily dismissed her action in January 2005 and continued to make payments to her creditors. But she kept falling further and further behind; her financial troubles "became known in her close-knit community."

Sometime in early January 2005, Slaymaker, a member of Blue Rock Mennonite Church, approached Fry and told her, "I don't think you should sell the farm. I want to help you save it," according to the complaint.

"Because of Slaymaker's association with the Mennonite church, Mrs. Fry trusted" Slaymaker, the complaint continues.

"Slaymaker proposed that he purchase Mrs. Fry's farm for $600,000 and that he would lease back the farm to her and she would have the right to purchase the farm back from him for five years," according to the complaint. Fry signed the sales agreement Jan. 15, 2005.

But after paying more than $159,000 in settlement charges, paying off a $164,000 mortgage with Bank of Lancaster County and another $100,000 mortgage with the U.S. Department of Agriculture — along with other fees — Fry wound up with just over $151,000 from the sale.

The agreement, according to the complaint, deeded Fry's farm to Slaymaker. Fry paid Slaymaker's attorney fees and title insurance, a total of $6,383.75; she paid transfer fees of $12,000, and all taxes and a "tobacco loan" of more than $9,500.

She would have five years to repurchase the property, at $750,000; and she was to pay rent of more than $5,100 per month.

"She was desperate," attorney Brown said. "She wanted to keep this farm she was shedding so much sweat on."

Fry said: "I was going to turn things around, I wanted to hold onto the farm and [Slaymaker] kept saying he wanted to help me save it."

On Friday, a reporter stopped at Slaymaker's business, Slaymaker Electric Motor & Supply Co., and was told by an employee that Slaymaker was referring all comment to his attorney, Michael Grab, who works out of the Columbia office of the Lancaster firm of Nikolaus & Hohenadel.

Grab, reached Friday afternoon, said he had not seen the complaint and couldn't comment on it.

"This is a very straightforward landlord-tenant matter," he said.

When her neighbors saw the deed transfer listed in the newspaper in August 2005, "they were incredulous," according to the complaint — and asked Fry what was going on. She said she could still buy the farm back if she wanted. "Still thinking that defendants had taken advantage of Mrs. Fry," Brown writes in the complaint, "neighbors approached Slaymaker to ask why he did what he did. Slaymaker informed the neighbors that he was just trying to help and did not want Mrs. Fry's farm."

And for nearly two years, Fry continued to work the farm as if it were still hers. But she struggled to make the $5,100 monthly payment, and stopped buying heating oil, did not go anywhere, had no hot water because her furnace heated the water and was unable to purchase basic life necessities," according to the complaint.

Said Fry, "when the temperature got down to 8 or 10 degrees I'd put a little [oil] in just to get the temperature up." Mostly, she relied on a space heater, and bundled up.

Still she fell behind.

At 8 a.m. on May 31, 2007, according to the complaint, Slaymaker showed up at Fry's farm as she was caring for her hogs. He wanted to talk, Brown wrote in the complaint; "he wanted to do her a favor and reduce the monthly payment to $4,500 per month." Fry, desperate, trusted Slaymaker because "he was a member of a plain Mennonite church, and held himself out as a religious man," according to the complaint.

"Slaymaker than asked Mrs. Fry if she would go with him to his attorney immediately to sign paperwork lowering her monthly rent," the complaint asserts. Fry cleaned up and went.

"Upon arriving at Attorney Grab's office, Slaymaker and Mrs. Fry were seen immediately," the complaint says. Fry was handed a nine-page, single-spaced lease agreement; the first page "contained the 'condensed terms' of the agreement and reflected what Slaymaker had told Mrs. Fry: her rent was decreased to 'only' $4,500 per month," the complaint asserts.

Fry was asked to sign the agreement and did; the meeting lasted less than 10 minutes.

But, the complaint asserts, "Neither Attorney Grab nor Slaymaker informed Mrs. Fry that hidden in the lease was a provision that she was giving up the right to purchase her farm provided to her in the 2005 agreement."

The lease, a copy of which was attached to the complaint, states on page 7: "The option to purchase previously granted Tenant, pursuant to a Lease Agreement between Landlord and Tenant dated on or about July, 2005, is hereby terminated."

Fry went back home and worked the farm as usual. But agricultural prices didn't get any better, and again Fry fell behind. "With the counsel of her family, she finally concluded that she would not be able to save the farm despite her years of hard work," Brown wrote in the complaint.

In early April 2009 she spoke with a neighbor who knew of an interested buyer — who agreed to pay Fry $16,000 per acre, for a total sale price of $1.392 million.

She contacted Slaymaker and told him she'd be paying him off and selling the farm.

Slaymaker, according to the complaint, "informed Mrs. Fry that she did not own the farm but he owned the farm."

Astonished, Fry asked how that could be. Slaymaker, according to the complaint, told her she'd given up her rights to the farm in 2007 — when her monthly payment had been modified.

Fry's neighbors rallied around her. "That contract set her up to fail," said the neighbor who asked not to be identified.

One neighbor, according to the complaint, went with Fry to meet with attorney Grab, according to the complaint, and asked him to explain how Slaymaker came to be the owner of the farm.

"At this meeting," Brown wrote in the complaint, "Slaymaker offered Mrs. Fry $15,000 to just leave the property." She refused.

Meanwhile, wrote Brown in the complaint, Slaymaker had already taken out one "open-ended mortgage" — which allows a mortgagor to re-borrow against principal already paid — for $600,000 in 2005. He would take out two more, totaling $350,000, in June and November 2009.

Meanwhile, Fry continued to live in the house. But she got rid of her hogs, and no longer planted tobacco. On April 20, 2010, Slaymaker "notified Mrs. Fry that she was in default of her lease and ordered her off her property in five days."

Attorney Brown, noting that landlords are required to give 30 days notice, said: "She's in the house, she's not leaving until a sheriff comes and moves her out."

The complaint lists four counts. The first is declaratory judgment: Fry wants the court to declare the 2007 agreement null and void.

The second count alleges fraud and misrepresentation; the third, conversion; and the fourth, unjust enrichment. All ask that the court "[t]emporarily and permanently enjoin defendants from receiving any additional loans on Mrs. Fry's farm."

All four counts also seek judgment "in favor of plaintiff in an amount in excess of the arbitration limits of this court."

That limit is $50,000, said Brown.

Court costs, attorney fees and punitive damages are also sought. The complaint asks for a trial by jury.

Brown said that, ideally, Fry would like the farm back, but "she's also come to conclusion she's not going to be able to run it, and [Slaymaker] has leveraged it so much."

Georgia Fry managed a wan smile in the Friday morning sunshine as she showed a reporter around what used to be her farm.

"I've been very sad and stressed out," she said. "I've been trying to work with [Slaymaker], and my neighbors have been going to him. I keep thinking, 'He's gonna come to his senses. It's not happening.'

"Now — I've got to do something."