For centuries, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Shawnee and Creek people groups shared the rich hunting grounds of Middle Tennessee. The parcel that is the bulk of present day Fieldstone Farms was a Revolutionary War land grant to a veteran named Thomas Edmiston. While making his way west, he survived the resistance of Native American tribes. Edmiston sold the land grant, which was described as “North of the dividing line between the big and Little Harpeth, thence up Little Harpeth to Richard Hightower’s and the Davidson County line” to Daniel Perkins in 1800, just months after Williamson County and the City of Franklin were established. The county population numbered only in the hundreds.

Daniel Perkins was one of five original county commissioners charged with overseeing the construction of the first courthouse and selecting the site of the county seat, as well as land surveying. He built himself a log cabin from the large beech grove lining the Harpeth (present day Lynwood Park area). Today the same stunning beech logs are still at the heart of our community – have you seen them?

The Perkins/Baxter family owned the land for several generations, although the later generations likely did not call it their primary home, as they had residences in Nashville. These were the generations who fought and struggled through the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. “Though the Battle of Franklin of November 30, 1864 did not reach onto the Fieldstone Farms area, the residents surely came into town the next morning to help out with the wounded and probably brought home a wounded soldier,” County Historian Rick Warwick tells.

In the 1920s, W.S. Hamilton Sr, who owned acreage where current-day Walnut Grove and Legends Ridge sit, briefly acquired the property. It was then purchased by E.E. Green, a former city treasurer, alderman, and at the time head cashier of the National Bank of Franklin. In 1927 Green was exposed for a massive embezzlement and fraud scheme that plunged the entire city into a financial crisis. His multiple over-leveraged properties were sold at auction. From this redistribution, what would become Cecilwood Farm and then Fieldstone Farms eventually made its way into the hands of Cecil Sims and his business partners: 420 acres for the sum of $7,320.96. w 1957

During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, while growing a law firm, managing a home in Belle Meade, and rearing four children with his wife Grace, Cecil Sims decided to try his hand at farming the Franklin land he acquired. He bought out his partners and studied every farming book printed. When Sgt. Cecil Sims, Jr. did not survive World War II, they named the summer and holiday homestead after him: Cecilwood. With the help of trusted tenants the Sawyer family, they rotated fields of barley, oats, corn and wheat to sustain Cecilwood’s livestock. Mr. Sims was in awe of the Perkins cabin; in 1937 he had each and every beech log carefully deconstructed and moved up the hill to construct his own three-room log cabin (where the clubhouse now sits). The Sims and Irvins lived in this home, upgraded over the years, until the land was sold to developers in 1987.

As children and grandchildren grew up on the farm, Mr. Sims researched and built useful and recreational novelties such as a bridge made of old telephone poles, tree house, observatory, bee hives, tennis court, zip line, an automated water trough hooked to a well, and an innovative concrete-floored hog house.

Meanwhile, he caught the week-day bus into Nashville to grow Bass Berry & Sims into a premier law firm. As a Vanderbilt University Law School alumnus (attended straight out of high school and graduated first in his class) and trustee, Mr. Sims played a significant role in the law school’s reopening after the war and its voluntary integration in the 1950s.

It was Sims’ clients - a railroad and construction company - that delivered a red caboose to the farm in the 1960s as a playhouse for the grandchildren, who called him “Oppa.” At summer parties the band stood atop the caboose while friends danced on the tennis courts below. Other evenings, Oppa enjoyed reading to the grandchildren in the caboose.

After Mr. Sims’ passing in 1967, his oldest daughter, Susie Sims Irvin, promised to carry on her father’s dream and permanently moved her own family of six to the farm. Susie created her own legacy in her beloved Franklin. She was a school teacher, FUMC Sunday School leader, and founder of the Church Women United of Franklin and Williamson County. Later years brought out a gifted artist and poet. Please find Clouds for the Table, a collection of her poems and paintings, at the library. A must-read is Susie’s stirring poem written for us: “The Land Waited.” It hangs in the Sims Log Cabin Room of the clubhouse.

Five generations of the Sims/Irvin family enjoyed this land for over six decades. It was their “Homeplace.” The idea of leaving was difficult. But when she was still young, Susie’s father began to teach her how to hold the land loosely, long before she would have to make the final break. Susie recalls the day she drove her daddy out to the farm for the last time and he said…. “Do whatever you all want to with the farm. I’ve enjoyed it all my years, and I hope you will, too. I want it to go to the children who will play in the creek and fish in the river and do all the things we like to do.”

“And it did,” Susie added. “It was a big decision, who we sold it to. We wanted it kept whole as long as we could tend it. People said, ‘You could have made a lot more money selling it off in pieces’ but we didn’t want to do it that way. It wasn’t about the money; it was about the land. When it got to be too much, and we decided to sell, we picked somebody that we thought would please him.”

In 1987, Susie and her husband, Frank Shearer Irvin, chose the Harlon Company for their integrity and vision. Above all, it was to be a place for the children to enjoy. They agreed to keep the signature white fences that lined Mr. Sims’ fields, the natural lay of the land, and the beech-log homestead (although its foundation was later deemed unsafe). And together they decided on the name Fieldstone Farms, as it was a working farm for many years, and many fieldstones dotted the landscape.

Harlon Co. acquired adjacent properties to create the full 720 acres for Franklin’s largest neighborhood. Over the next six years, 2,137 new homes were built. The land was altered and a new kind of community was created.

How can we continue to love our neighbors, our city, our land? Susie ends her poem to us with a charge: … tend them carefully and with reverence… She passed away in 2015, just days before she was to attend the dedication of the newest playground in Fieldstone Farms, Susie Sims Park. May we carry forward the legacy of this family and this land, for there will be others yet to come.