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Gift Keeps Historic Home, Land Safe From Development 
FRANKLIN — Mother Nature may eventually change Ridley and Irene Wills' land near the Meeting of the Waters house, but civilization won't intrude any longer. The couple has placed a conservation easement on 65 acres around their historic antebellum home in Williamson County's Forest Home community, donating it to the Land Trust for Tennessee. The move ensures protection of the home's backdrop of an empty, pristine field as subdivisions and commercial developments pop up throughout the county. Just down Del Rio Pike from their home, trees have been cut down at Two Rivers subdivision, exposing the obelisk marking the graves of Meeting of the Waters builder and Revolutionary War officer Thomas Hardin Perkins and his family members. Calling the activity on that nearby subdivision "another spur" for making the donation, author and historian Ridley Wills said the couple had fielded offers from developers interested in buying the land, but all were rejected. Restoring the house and buying the land around it have been goals the couple sought for years, eventually acquiring the land and reacquiring its mineral rights to prevent more e phosphate mining that once went on there . |
