Why Fieldstone Farms Only Allows Yard Sales Twice a Year

The first Saturday in October, a handful of cul-de-sacs across Fieldstone Farms turn into open-air markets. Card tables spill onto driveways, kids sell lemonade next to boxes of outgrown cleats, and by mid-morning a Goodwill truck is parked at Hunters Bend Elementary taking donations until it's full. This year that Saturday falls on October 3, running 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., rain or shine, exactly as it has every fall for years.

What most residents don't stop to ask is why this only happens twice a year. Not once a month, not whenever someone wants to clear out a garage. Twice. The Fieldstone Farms Homeowners Association is explicit about it: garage, yard, moving, and estate sales are permitted only on the first Saturday of May and the first Saturday of October, and at no other time. The rule isn't a city ordinance. It's a private covenant the HOA chose to write and still chooses to enforce, on top of whatever permit the City of Franklin already requires for any individual sale. That's an extra layer of friction most Franklin homeowners never deal with, and it says something about how this particular 720-acre community decided to run itself back when it was first laid out.

The Rule Behind the Rule

To understand why Fieldstone Farms caps yard sales at two Saturdays instead of letting residents post a sign whenever they feel like it, it helps to go back to how the land got here in the first place. Before it was 2,137 houses, this was Cecilwood Farm, a working property Nashville attorney Cecil Sims bought and farmed through the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, rotating barley, oats, corn, and wheat with the help of tenant farmers the Sawyer family. Sims was taken enough with an old Perkins family log cabin on the property that in 1937 he had it dismantled beech log by beech log and rebuilt up the hill, on the spot where the neighborhood clubhouse now stands.

When Sims died in 1967, his daughter Susie Sims Irvin took over the farm and lived there with her own family for decades. It was Susie and her husband, Frank Shearer Irvin, who eventually sold the land to a developer, the Harlon Company, in 1987. But they didn't sell it as a blank canvas. According to the neighborhood's own history page, the Irvins chose Harlon specifically for its willingness to keep the white fences that had lined Sims's fields, preserve the natural contours of the land, and save the log cabin rather than clear it. The name Fieldstone Farms came directly from that agreement: the property had been a working farm for decades, and fieldstones still dotted the ground when the houses went up.

That context matters because it reframes the twice-a-year sale rule as part of a pattern, not an isolated inconvenience. A developer who agreed to bend around an old log cabin and a line of fences was setting a tone that residential turnover here would happen on the neighborhood's terms, not as a constant low-grade churn of signs and strangers pulling up to driveways every weekend. The garage sale calendar is a small, present-day echo of a decision made almost forty years ago.

The Room Behind the Clubhouse Door

The log cabin didn't disappear once the subdivision was built. It's still there, tucked inside the clubhouse as what residents call the Sims Log Cabin Room. Susie Sims Irvin, who taught school, led Sunday school at First United Methodist Church, and founded the Church Women United of Franklin and Williamson County, spent her later years writing and painting. A collection of her work, called Clouds for the Table, is held at the local library, and a poem she wrote for the neighborhood, titled "The Land Waited," hangs inside that room today.

None of this shows up on a listing sheet. It's the kind of detail a resident only learns by walking into the clubhouse for a board meeting or a kids' event and noticing the framed poem on the wall. But it's also the clearest evidence that Fieldstone Farms was built by people who wanted the land's history to stay visible, not paved over. The garage sale rule, the preserved cabin, and the fences are all pieces of the same original agreement.

What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall

Beyond the confirmed October 3 garage sale, the HOA runs a recurring set of resident-only events through the fall and into the holidays. The exact dates shift slightly year to year, so it's worth checking the official Fieldstone Farms events calendar before you plan around any of them, but the pattern has held steady:

Earlier this year the community also held its annual Fourth of July celebration, a resident parade starting at the clubhouse followed by popsicles, a pool opening, airbrush tattoos, a photo booth, and karaoke. The HOA also runs a recurring evening called Ladies Night in Fieldstone, which turns the clubhouse into a pop-up social with skincare treatments and pre-purchased food and drink. None of these are city of Franklin events. They're run entirely by neighbors, for neighbors, which is a different kind of calendar than most subdivisions this size manage to sustain.

The Amenity Most Residents Drive Past

Ask a Fieldstone Farms resident what the HOA dues cover and most will mention the pools first. There are two: Club West Pool at 1530 Lexington Parkway and Club East Pool at 501 Black Horse Parkway, both included in monthly dues along with a clubhouse fitness center and a tennis and pickleball program built around two clay courts and two hard courts layered with four pickleball courts.

What gets mentioned less often is the water outside the pools. After Franklin removed a dam near the Carnton Plantation grounds in 2012, the Harpeth River became a clean, free-flowing stretch that the city and the Harpeth River Watershed Association began opening up with canoe access points across town, and Fieldstone Farms was named as one of the proposed sites in that expansion. Today the neighborhood's own park along the river functions as a put-in for paddlers, which is a genuinely uncommon amenity for a subdivision this far from downtown Franklin. Add in the miles of walking trails threading between the 26 sub-associations, a dog park, and a walkable stretch to shops along Hillsboro Road, and the pools turn out to be the least distinctive thing about how residents actually spend a Saturday here.

The Pattern Underneath It All

Line these pieces up and a single thread runs through them. The twice-a-year garage sale cap, the preserved log cabin, the framed poem, the river access nobody advertises loudly: all of it traces back to a developer who agreed, in 1987, to build around what was already there instead of erasing it. Most Franklin subdivisions from that era chose speed and uniformity. Fieldstone Farms chose to keep its fences white and its farm underfoot, and thirty-nine years later that choice still shapes something as small as when you're allowed to put a sign in your yard.

If you already live here, none of this changes your Saturday. But it might change how you think about the rule the next time you're waiting for October to roll around to finally clear out the garage. And if you're the kind of longtime neighbor who's started wondering what a move within Fieldstone Farms, or out of it, might look like someday, Robert Werkheiser has spent enough time in this specific market to talk through it honestly. Let's talk about your next move.