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Duck River Highlands Project Area 
A grassroots call to action for historic preservation drew a big response from a tri-county group of landowners and supporters. Communities have raised thousands of dollars to match funds from a federal historic preservation grant of the Tennessee Historical Commission to inventory the character, history and current land use patterns of rural Middle Tennessee farmland.
Richard Quin, an architectural historian originally from the Duck River region, leads the project team of historian and folklorist Betty Bringle Chapman and agronomist May Bartlett. They are taking an inventory of the historic, agricultural and cultural resources of communities in the Snow Creek and Leipers Creek valleys in Maury County and the Lick Creek valley of Williamson, Maury and Hickman counties which includes some of the most beautiful, undisturbed and historically rich farm communities in the state. The team explores door to door, visiting with residents about their farms, their families, and their homes, and mapping all features with GPS. The results will be available to these communities to use for tailoring their grassroots-driven conservation plans. This project represents a new outlook for conservation planning in Tennessee: Instead of focusing on individual properties, the team studies the cultural landscape as a whole—an interrelated web of people and their stories, farms, woodlands, private homes and public gathering places. The Land Trust sees the natural and cultural landscapes as intertwined, continually creating and defining a high quality of life for its inhabitants. We are encouraged that so many landowners care deeply about the long-term conservation of farmlands and open space and are interested in discussing conservation tools offered by The Land Trust. This is an ambitious project with a large scope, but as stories from the field and community support keep pouring in, we remain hopeful about the far-reaching success from this work. To view or order the report, click here. |
