On a Tuesday afternoon, the front door of a white Victorian farmhouse swings open onto a stretch of rolling green pasture where some of the most famous horses in Tennessee history once grazed. The Historic Hayes House, at the center of The Park at Harlinsdale Farm, is open for free tours from noon to 2 p.m., and there is no ticket to buy, no reservation to make, and no capacity limit to worry about. Walk-ups are welcome. For anyone curious about how a 200-acre horse farm on the edge of downtown Franklin became one of the region's most beloved public parks, the tour is a chance to step inside the story rather than just read about it.
The house itself is older than the farm that made it famous, and its origins have little to do with horses. It was built in 1899 by Joshua Bates Lillie, a flour magnate whose Lillie Mill Company, also known as the Franklin Flouring Mill, was the first major industry to rise in Franklin after the Civil War. Established in 1868, the mill helped revive a local economy that had been devastated by the war, and for years it was the largest commercial venture in Williamson County. Its "Franklin Lady" flour became a top-selling brand across the nation, carrying the name of a small Tennessee town into kitchens far beyond it.
Lillie's connection to the land along Franklin Road came through his third wife, Mary Farmer Lillie, whom he married on February 13, 1889. She and her brother William H. Farmer owned a farm on the road, and when fire destroyed the main house on the Farmers' property, Lillie commissioned a new residence to replace it. On October 5, 1899, the Williamson County News reported that construction was underway. That house is the one standing today. It was the last property Lillie commissioned before his death in 1908, which makes the building a kind of final signature from one of Franklin's most consequential nineteenth-century businessmen.
For the next few decades the house passed into a different world entirely. In the early 1930s, brothers Wirt and Alex Harlin began buying farmland off Franklin Road, using earnings from the Red Kap clothing company to expand a small-scale operation into a breeding farm for a relatively new type of gaited horse: the Tennessee Walking Horse. In 1933 the brothers acquired the property that would become Harlinsdale, including the Victorian farmhouse that would serve as the beating heart of the farm. As the business grew, they persuaded their 25-year-old nephew, Harlin Hayes, to relocate from Gamaliel, Kentucky, and join the operation. The Hayes family moved into the house, and their name stuck to it.
What the Harlins built there became legendary in the breed. Harlinsdale was home to Midnight Sun, the two-time World Grand Champion Tennessee Walking Horse, who took the title in 1945 and 1946 at the National Celebration in Shelbyville. Midnight Sun was the first stallion to become world champion of his kind, and his influence did not end with his own victories. He sired horses that went on to become grand champions seven times, grand-sired the supreme winner five times, and became the great-grandsire of nearly every champion since. According to the horse's record, on only four occasions since 1949 has a world champion of the breed not descended from Midnight Sun in a straight male line. Williamson County historian Rick Warwick has put it plainly: the vast majority of the grand champions at Shelbyville can trace their bloodline back to this grand sire.
For seven decades Harlinsdale operated as a working farm. In 2005 the Harlin family sold the 200-acre property to the City of Franklin, and two years later the city opened it to the public as a passive park. The scenic farmland still looks much as it did during its breeding days, and horses remain part of the landscape. The park today includes walking and hiking trails, a four-acre dog park, a three-acre pond approved for catch-and-release fishing, a 5k soft turf track, an equestrian trail, and the Tractor Supply Arena, where the Franklin Polo Academy holds matches.
But while the rest of the farm was transformed into a park, the Hayes House sat vacant and largely untouched. In 2012, the City of Franklin and the State Historic Commission funded repairs to the roof, gutters, and porch, but no further money was available to do more than prevent the home from declining further. It took another decade and a community effort to bring it back. In March 2022, Friends of Franklin Parks, the nonprofit that manages rentals and programming at the park, began a full restoration supported by gifts from community members. The design committee approached the project with a guiding idea: that the rooms should act as storytellers, capturing more than a century of history. The structure was returned to its nineteenth-century roots while the interior was allowed to reflect multiple eras of the family's life there.
The result is a house that wears its layers openly. Visitors walk on original wood floors and past carefully sourced wallpaper. The kitchen has been restored to the way it appeared in the 1950s, a period when Harlinsdale Farm and the foals of Midnight Sun were in high demand; originally outfitted with a wood stove, it was updated with new appliances in that decade. One of the more unusual details is a one-of-a-kind 1950s kitchen floor, recreated from vintage linoleum that workers uncovered during the renovation.
The house reopened to the public with a grand opening on Tuesday, May 6, 2025, and free tours have run every Tuesday and Thursday from noon to 2 p.m. since, with appointments available for those who want a guided walk-through outside regular hours. Groups of six or more are asked to call ahead. The house also doubles as an event venue, with an adjacent event lawn, and is available for rentals and community gatherings, arts festivals among them.
"For over 100 years the Hayes House has been a special part of Franklin's agricultural history, and now it has been preserved so that our community can come and learn about this historic horse farm at the Park at Harlinsdale Farm," says Dr. Monty McInturff, a founding board member of Friends of Franklin Parks and chair of the Harlinsdale Committee. McInturff's connection to the place is not merely civic. He spent much of his youth on the land, working there as a farm laborer and later as a veterinarian, and he recalls being excited when he heard the Harlin family had sold the property to the city as a park. Part of the deal, he has said, was that it be kept as a place where horses could play and be.
That instinct, to keep the land whole rather than let it be subdivided, is the thread running through the whole story. Harlinsdale's location on the edge of downtown Franklin made it prime real estate for developers, but both McInturff and Warwick have said it mattered to the Harlin family and to the city that the farm stay intact. Warwick framed the stakes in terms of heritage: Williamson County was once one of the leading agricultural counties in the state, and the open pasture at Harlinsdale is a reminder of that identity at a moment when the region is, as he put it, raising houses instead.
The free tours are a small, unglamorous thing by comparison, but they are the mechanism by which all of this stays visible. There is no ticketing system, no timed entry, no cap on how many people can come through. A visitor can walk in off Franklin Road on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon and stand in the same kitchen where the Hayes family cooked while Midnight Sun's foals were being raised in the fields outside. The house that a flour baron built as a replacement for a burned home, that a clothing-company family turned into the anchor of a horse farm, and that sat empty for years while the land around it became a park, is now doing the work its restorers intended: telling the story of more than a century of Franklin's agricultural life, one room at a time.