A real estate developer is quietly reshaping a corner of rural Tennessee, buying up hundreds of acres around a town of roughly 900 people to build a neighborhood centered on a working farm and a church. The project near Gainesboro has drawn national attention as both a bold vision of community-building and, to some residents, an unsettling attempt at ideological takeover.
A Farm, a Church, and Dozens of Lots
Developer Josh Abbotoy is planning a Gainesboro-area neighborhood with dozens of residential lots built around a working farm and, crucially, a church, according to the BBC. Abbotoy is the founder of the real estate company RidgeRunner, which has bought land in Tennessee and neighboring Kentucky, the outlet reports. Gainesboro itself is a town of around 900 people with a single traffic light, per the same BBC account, and Abbotoy expects the first houses to go up and new residents to begin moving in starting in early 2027.
Property records examined by NewsChannel 5 show Abbotoy bought up 500 acres on the Macon-Jackson County line, while a related corporation purchased another 100 acres near downtown Gainesboro. That same corporation also bought a small office building on East Hull Avenue in Gainesboro, where the station reports that figures identified as Isker and Engel are setting up a podcast studio. Jackson County, where Gainesboro serves as the county seat, is home to an estimated 12,711 people, the station notes, citing census data.
Inside the ‘Charter Community’ Model
RidgeRunner describes its approach on its own site as developing town-and-country “charter communities” in Tennessee and Kentucky, and the company says it does not vet customers or require an application process, stating plainly that all of its properties are open to the general public. One of its current projects, Brewington Farms in Whitleyville, is billed as an agrihood inspired by old English villages, featuring a working cow farm, sheep, walking trails, a farm store, and a playground for residents. The first phase is planned to include a cottage court along with several seven-to-15-acre “holler” lots, according to the company's own listings.
That local build-out sits inside a much larger ambition. RidgeRunner's broader Highland Rim Project is described by Politico as an audacious effort to build conservative Christian charter communities throughout Appalachia. The company has purchased or contracted to purchase more than 4,000 acres divided into roughly 200 lots, the magazine reports, with about half of those lots already sold or under contract and initial construction expected to begin later in the summer.
A Pattern Beyond Jackson County
NPR frames the activity in Gainesboro as part of a growing movement by some far-right Christian nationalists to relocate to red states and turn small towns into what the outlet calls white enclaves. The push comes amid a broader demographic shift: a University of Tennessee researcher cited by Word&Way says rural Tennessee counties have seen more migration so far this decade than during the entire previous decade. Jackson County specifically lost more residents than it gained between 2010 and 2020, but the same report notes a couple hundred people have moved there so far this decade.
Similar efforts have surfaced elsewhere. In Kentucky, a planned development tied to related entities was pitched as an “aligned community” for rightwingers hoping to, in the developers' own words, disappear from the cultural insanity of the broader country, according to the Guardian. That outlet reports the Longhollow offering covers 550 acres and could net sellers at least $2.27 million; Kentucky Ridge Runner paid $900,000 for a 460-acre tract. Word&Way separately reports that lots in a comparable RidgeRunner project in Kentucky have been priced between $35,000 and $329,000.
The phenomenon isn't confined to Appalachia, either. In Battle Ground, Washington, a town of roughly 23,000 people, business leaders and a pastor tied to the “Christian localism” movement have been reshaping the community, according to OPB, which reports that executives at Maddox Industrial Transformer said the company had invested in at least 30 properties in town, a figure the station confirmed through property records. NewsChannel 5 has separately drawn a comparison between the Jackson County project and Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson's efforts to turn Moscow, Idaho, into what's been described as a church town.
The story has now reached a national audience through Bloomberg, whose Big Take podcast followed events in Gainesboro as a group of far-right Christians moves into the town with plans for what the segment calls a radical social experiment. For a community of fewer than a thousand people and one traffic light, the attention marks a striking turn — one that will keep playing out as RidgeRunner's lots fill in and the first new houses rise at the start of 2027.
