By JACK HOPKINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Herman and Ruth Schoenbachler remember what the Southcenter area was like before developers paved over the rich farmland, put in multilane freeways, built those shopping malls and filled the remaining spots with business parks and light industry.

"This whole area used to be farmland. But this is all that's left," says Herman Schoenbachler as he looked out over the tiny green field next to his house and barn. The couple lives on the only 10 acres of still-rural land remaining from their 200-acre dairy farm just down the street from the site of the former Pavilion Mall.

"We used to have cattle. We had a dairy farm right down the hill where the theater is going in. Now we just have 23 llamas and a donkey," he says. "The llamas and us -- we are spending our twilight years here together."

Across the street from the Schoenbachlers and their llamas is an asphalt plant. Next door is a golf driving range. Just up the road cars and trucks rumble by and hordes of shoppers jam the commercial establishments.

The Schoenbachlers -- he's 76, she's 72 -- have no plans to give up their 10 acres, one of the few remaining tracts of farmland in the area.

They aren't being pressured to sell it to developers in any event. "Nobody wants this land," he says. "It has a ditch here that causes a lot of problems. It's a wetland."

The Schoenbachlers never expected to find themselves living on a tiny farm in the middle of a heavily developed area. In their wildest dreams they didn't envision all of the development that has taken place on the once-pristine farmland. But they are making the best of it.

"You've got to live somewhere," Herman Schoenbachler says.

Dorothy Yantis also knows what it is like to see commercial development make its way closer and closer to the family homestead.

She has lived down the street from the Schoenbachlers for the last 25 years. Southcenter Mall was already open when she moved in, but commercial development didn't chew up most of the surrounding farmland until later.

There was a big U-pick strawberry field nearby and the area still had wide open spaces when she bought the house. The strawberry field disappeared about a decade ago. Most of the vacant land was eaten up too, although crops are still grown in a small field behind her house.

"We had company that came from Atlanta recently," Yantis says. "He looked at the field planted in corn and pumpkins and thought we were really out in the country. But you go one-tenth of a mile up the road and it is a strip mall."

Still, the location is convenient for Yantis, a part-time merchandiser with Hallmark. It takes her just five minutes to get to work some days.

"We kind of enjoy being here and will stay as long as we can," she says. "But once the bulldozers push the dirt up to the side of the property, we get out."

Development has, indeed, swallowed up almost all of the farmland in the Southcenter area, which lies mostly in Tukwila, but inches out into unincorporated King County.

Most Puget Sound residents, of course, know the area because of the Southcenter Mall, which was the largest covered mall west of the Mississippi River when it opened in 1968. That, and the commercial establishments that rushed forward to be near it.

Many of the big chains were quick to open near the mall and others have been added in recent years -- stores such as Ross, Target, Circuit City, Computer City, Video Only, Home Depot, Blockbuster Video, CompUSA and Eagle Hardware & Garden.

But there is much more to the area whose residents mostly live in apartments and condominiums on the hills overlooking the mall and heavily traveled Interstates 5 and 405.