Dixie Chopper Fillmore site sold; to become tire distribution facility

Tuesday, July 21, 2020
The 12,000-square-foot Dixie Chopper site on 12.88 acres near Fillmore has been sold to a Zionsville businessman who will convert it into a tire distribution center.
Banner Graphic/ERIC BERNSEE

FILLMORE -- The sale of the Dixie Chopper property just northwest of Fillmore earlier this month effectively writes an end to the final chapter of the “World’s Fastest Lawn Mower” in Putnam County.

The 12.88-acre site, including 12,000 square feet of buildings, has been sold on contract to Mark Hadley of Zionsville, Clint Cooper of Carpenter Realtors confirmed Tuesday.

Hadley plans to convert the property into a tire distribution center. Clean-up and renovation efforts are already under way at the site.

Clint Cooper

“He has warehouses in Ohio, Kentucky and Georgia that he leases,” Cooper said. “He’s getting more square footage at Dixie Chopper than the Ohio and Kentucky facilities combined and will pay less monthly payments.

“And in moving those facilities here, he will be an hour from home instead of three to five hours,” Cooper added.

The property, owned by the Art Evans family, was listed for $1.8 million and was sold on contract for $1.5 million.

The real estate listing noted that the sprawling facility included offices, boardrooms, a warehouse, manufacturing space and five loading docks.

Calling the sale the second biggest of his real estate career, Cooper said the transaction “has taken a substantial amount of patience, persistence and time but the Dixie Chopper factory chapter has come to an end.”

He praised Dixie Chopper founder Art Evans for remaining positive throughout the three-year journey from listing to sale.

“Through these three years, the man who invented Dixie Chopper and I have become good friends,” added Cooper who has sold Evans a property in Brownsburg with a house, 25 acres and access to an airstrip. “For Art, I know it was probably a bittersweet feeling selling the empire he built but more importantly, the last piece of the Evans family’s original farm.”

It was on that site that Evans conceived and built the very first zero-turning-radius Dixie Chopper on April 15, 1980 in an old dairy barn on his parents’ small farm near Fillmore.

Headquartered in Fillmore, every single Dixie Chopper manufactured and assembled between 1980 and 2018 was built in Putnam County. The workforce, which during its heyday topped 200, was at approximately 100 people when the plant was shuttered after the November 2018 sale to Textron Outdoor Power Equipment Inc.

In August 2019, Alamo Group Inc. announced the acquisition of Dixie Chopper from Textron, relocating the manufacturing of the mower line to its Gibson City, Ill., factory, where the company also produces the RhinoAg implements.

Overall, it was quite a nearly 35-year ride for Evans from the humble dairy farm beginnings to his selection as 2006 Indiana Entrepreneur of the Year (he finished among the top three finalists at the national competition in Palm Springs).

At one time in the early 2000s, the family-owned company operated the Fillmore plant, ran assembly lines in the old Mallory Capacitor Corp. building on Indianapolis Road (since demolished) and had the Dixie Chopper Business Center at the airport with a hotel, restaurant and training facilities for its dealers and territory managers.

Family ownership of Dixie Chopper ended in 2014 with the sale to Textron, though the mowers continued to be manufactured in Fillmore for another four years.

Alamo Group produces and sells more than 30 brands across its industrial, agricultural and European divisions, including 10 others in its agricultural division. Currently, Bush Hog is the only other brand under the Alamo umbrella producing a zero-turn mower.

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  • Hope this brings some jobs back to Putnam county. Hope we also learned our lesson about paying extra for a lawnmower to support a local job creator who sold out for millions.

    Remember folks: the city, the county, and the individual citizens lay out all the money, and the owners get to keep it all. Those facts should guide us when considering tax breaks or paying premium prices for locally made products.

    -- Posted by techphcy on Thu, Jul 23, 2020, at 10:22 AM
  • Wow!

    -- Posted by beg on Fri, Jul 24, 2020, at 8:28 AM
  • Clint, there is a small correction to your story. The first Dixie Chopper was built in the Machine shop in the back of the Parts store I bought from Art and Jane in the late ‘70s. It was paint with John Deer green paint. He and Red Hayden fabricated it!

    -- Posted by dstarr1948 on Mon, Sep 5, 2022, at 4:53 PM
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