The Home Place

Jen Cartwright & C.J. Sentell

6806 Clarksville Highway
Joelton, Tennessee 37080

Jen bought this place from Thomas Lewis of Hendersonville, Tennessee on March 6, 2009, and we finally made it home at the beginning of May. Thomas was born and raised here, his family owning it and living here for the last 75 years or so. Formerly a much larger parcel of land, the Lewis' slowly sold various pieces extending down Harper Road over the years, leaving the homestead and acreage for which we have become stewards.

The house next door used to be a dairy dip restaurant, which several people remember with fondness, and now Kim, Matt, and their family live there. Matt is a seasoned roofer at 24 and an urban transplant from East Nashville; Kim hails from Portland, TN and is the primary caretaker of Matt's mother (recovering from a recent stroke) and two sons. Across the street is a well-known local watering hole, with pool and poker tables aplenty. The neighbor sharing the longest property line, Frank Krantz, arrived after the Lewis family but before the opening of the bar. A widower and father of three, we met Frank one afternoon while he was "dry land fishing" - or Morel mushroom hunting - which he's been cultivating in the gully between our places for over 60 years. He and his good buddy - also known as some of the best homemade wine makers on the ridge - left the hillside that day with two plastic grocery sacks full of mushrooms. Frank also feeds the deer and wild turkeys, and has attracted a large flock of the latter that numbers well over 100 birds. He lets friends selectively harvest from this bounty, and is the closest to Thoreau's wild farmer I have met.

Situated between Clarksville Pike, Harper Road, and I-24, the property consists of 11.59 acres zoned rural for agricultural use on the northern boundary of Davidson County. With ample pasture, mature forests, and an active watershed feeding a deep pond hidden in a hollow, there are several distinct habitats for wildlife and wild lives.

Ecotone is the name it has suggested to us. Technically the term belongs to ecology, and designates a transitional area between two or more distinct ecological communities. Like the science, the word is relatively young - gaining widespread usage only after the turn of the last century - and derives from two much older Greek words, oikos and tonos. A home, domicile, or place of dwelling, the oikos was the foundation for politics and the organizing principle for economics; it was the place through which they became possible, and so the source for developing means appropriate to its various ends. Tonos, on the other hand, was a word born of sound, and referred to the tension or stretching of voice or music - think tone and tonality - whose trajectories form the borderlines between poles of opposition.