What Franklin is known for

Franklin is a fast-growing Nashville suburb, known for the 1864 Battle of Franklin and for reclaiming the battlefield. The town razed strip malls that had paved over the ground to recover the one asset that made it singular. Williamson County, anchored by Franklin, drew 8.8 million visitors in 2024.

A battlefield under a suburb

Franklin was the site of one of the bloodiest few hours of the Civil War, the 1864 Battle of Franklin around the Carter House. But a century of suburban growth had buried the battlefield: a strip mall faced the Carter House, a Pizza Hut sat where a Confederate general fell, and the ground that set the town apart was vanishing under Nashville’s spreading suburbs.

The land was now valuable commercial real estate. Recovering it meant doing the hardest thing in American development, which is to un-develop: to buy occupied, income-producing property and tear it down to expose dirt.

Buying back the ground

Franklin did exactly that, on purpose and at scale. Preservationists and the community razed the Pizza Hut parcel in 2005, turning the spot into a memorial park. In 2012 the Civil War Trust and the nonprofit Franklin’s Charge bought the Domino’s strip center across from the Carter House for $1.85 million and removed it, reclaiming the battlefield building by building.

A national model

The town assembled the roughly 20-acre Carter Hill Battlefield Park while preserving its 15-block Victorian Main Street. Williamson County, anchored by Franklin, drew 8.8 million visitors and a record $1.37 billion in spending in 2024, supporting about 9,000 jobs and nearly $56 million in local tax revenue. The American Battlefield Trust now calls Franklin a national model.

Why it worked

Franklin’s draw was created by a deliberate reversal, the rare decision to un-build the present in order to recover the past. Tearing down profitable, income-producing buildings to restore a battlefield runs against the grain of every economic incentive, which is exactly why almost no town does it.

By pursuing the asset that set it apart, and pairing it with a preserved Main Street and the Factory, a former stove works turned marketplace, Franklin turned erased history into a billion-dollar visitor economy out of scale with a single county.