From 1770 to 1930 there had been a steady expansion of settlement onto the lands of Tennessee. From an original European density of less than one person per square mile, the density had risen to six by the time Davy Crockett arrived in Franklin County around 1810. A century later in 1910, the density was about 52 per square mile. It is currently about 128 per square mile. Beginning about 1930 the farms began to empty as the Depression forced families off the land and as wider social and economic forces attracted young people to towns and cities. Across America from 1900 to the present the percent of farmers in the population has declined. At the same time, however, recent decades have seen a re-settling of farms and rural areas. Although fewer people are farming, more people are beginning to live on farms.
There is an interesting but disturbing pattern in this return to the land. Several factors have contributed to the increasing density of population in the rural areas of the county. The deterioration and congestion of life in the cities and towns have been factors as people move to the country to escape noise, crime, closely-spaced houses, and increasing taxes. The general aging of the American population is bringing increasing numbers of people into retirement, and many of these people couple retirement with a removal from their former place of residence to their "retirement home." These retirement homes are frequently lake residences or small acreage tracts surrounding the towns of the county. For retirees moving into Franklin County from other places as well as for people moving out of the towns, security is an important consideration. On balance, the countryside is comparatively free from most forms of crime except burglary and is significantly free of random assaults and violence.
Additional factors influencing the re-settlement of the countryside include the low cost of land in the county and the availability of services such as water, power, and gas. It has now become easier to live in the country. The roads are paved and the plumbing is good in the houses. In some areas there is lighting along the roads and individual security lighting is common. Some rural areas have cable-TV access, and satellite dish costs are apparently within the range of anyone. Even marginal housing located in the waste areas of the county may display satellite dishes in the yard. A variety of inexpensive yard-keeping machines are now available to mow, plow, and haul so that attractive yards and gardens can be maintained with little effort. The new settlers of the countryside need to spend very few hours in lawn maintenance or in weed-eating fences or edges.
Twenty-five years have seen many changes around the county. Now most rural roads are paved. Someone desiring to observe an old lane must look carefully to find one. People of Mexican, Japanese, and upper Mid-West American background are steadily becoming more numerous in the county. These changes are reflected in the faces, the voices, and in the grocery stores. The rural areas of the county now have fire departments and most cut hay is rolled not baled. This quarter-century has seen a significant shift toward bi-vocational farming--where farming is conducted by fewer people using more equipment who also work at off-farm jobs. Metal storage grain bins are now found on most farms and large bin clusters are found throughout the county. In most areas of the county, including the developing Mennonite community around Belvedere, the Tyson Foods signs have become more numerous as farmers contract with Tyson as a way of economically surviving on their family farms.
What is currently going on in the rural areas of the county does not reflect new hope for old ways or for an agricultural lifestyle. Far from it. Americans are not returning to farming but are suburbanizing the former agricultural lands. This suburbanizing results in a serious and irreversible fragmentation of the agricultural landscape which makes machine intensive farming over large fields inefficient. In addition, the suburban aesthetic values brought by the new homeowners lead to the planting and maintenance of large grass lawns, the removal of protective fence and hedgerows, and dissatisfaction with the routines and interruptions of agricultural life. A focal, if minor, area of conflict is the patent impatience with which most new rural dwellers--and their children--greet tractors and harvesters that they have to slow down for on the narrow roads of the farming areas. Typically the response is to resent the inconvenience caused by the tractor instead of being glad for the farmer's contribution to their food supply.
At the same time, these suburban values are often keyed on an effete and naive sentimentality about natural processes and wildlife. Animals are viewed as "cute" or "pretty" and live in "families". Woodlots become the "homes" of the animals. The result is that normal farming and rural realities are misunderstood. The depositing of the carcasses of dead livestock along the roadside awaiting sanitary disposal by the county is widely misunderstood and seen as offensive. The culling of diseased or injured animals is a necessity of farm life that does not set well with the sensibilities of parents and their children emotionally weaned on Disney movies. Suburban values are also strongly oriented against hunting, and the sound of gunfire during the normal hunting season now brings many calls to the sheriff's office and protests to county commissioners. The relocation of suburban style housing into the countryside produces an inevitable conflict of values with people who must manage livestock or who hunt as a form of partial subsistence.
The result of the resettling of the countryside is the development across the county of many "rural to urban transition zones" or RUTZ. These are land areas that were formerly rural or agricultural and which now are being developed as extensions of "urban" or town-based processes. Often a RUTZ will develop around a cross-road or intersection, usually in conjunction with the up-grading of a store to a convenience market or in the building of a new gas station. Other stores or facilities follow. A second or third gas station may be built, or a recreational service facility such as a boat garage may be built. Nearby, a farm field may be divided and several houses built. These houses may be in sight of the developing intersection or removed from it. A RUTZ is defined by development and the transformation of land away from agricultural processes, but RUTZ do not have to be contiguous to or within the boundaries of towns. The development around the Rt. 41 by-pass--from Kurl's Corner to McDonald's--is contiguous to Winchester; the development from Dry Creek on Rt. 50 to Tims Ford Dam and Tims Ford State Park is not contiguous to a chartered town.
A careful plotting of RUTZ on a Franklin County road map will indicate several nodes of development. The area between the Centennial community and Cowan must be considered a RUTZ area along with the entire area along the highway from Estill Springs to Tullahoma. The North Franklin County fire district must also be considered and important RUTZ. In the Sewanee sector the area between Sewanee and Monteagle, both along Rt. 41 and along parallel roads, is exhibiting RUTZ transformation as is the developing community around Jumpoff. RUTZ development may often have one or more nodes where houses or businesses are clustered, but RUTZ are not necessarily centered and intact. In fact is the typically un-centered and fragmented character of RUTZ that make them difficult political and economic problems for predominantly rural counties. RUTZ have the capacity to make urban-type demands upon the local infrastructure without supporting formal political or civil organization. The rural fire service areas are a good example of the kind of problems that result from un-chartered RUTZ development.
Ultimately the solution to RUTZ development in a county is comprehensive county management via county-wide municipal government, but it is the nature of RUTZ development as geo-politically fragmented that this kind of complex agreement is seldom reached. Most counties in Middle Tennessee and many in East and West Tennessee are experiencing RUTZ development, but traditional political alliances between blocks of farmers and chartered towns or grandfathered schemes exempting towns from county-wide incorporation often keep rural Tennessee counties from attaining the efficiencies of integrated government. Franklin County may be a good example of a worst case example of the impact of RUTZ development and the inability of the county to handle it. Strong political foci within the chartered towns and rivalries between those towns combined with inherited elements of power within the prevailing forms of local organization have effectively mitigated for more than two decades against the provision of adequate public services, funding for education, or strategies for controlled development in the county. As a result, by the time political organization reaches the point that it could control or guide the effects of RUTZ development, the issues will be moot because the county will have become contiguously developed as a large RUTZ.
In the last quarter century, Franklin County has experienced noticable rural growth. Hundreds of houses have been projected into the countryside and this kind of development is occurring so fast in so many areas at once that local administrators of the E-911 system admit that mapping of new additions to the system will become a permanent overhead feature of 911 administration. When the 911 system was under design it appeared to be the working assumption that once the first map base was developed it could be kept up to date via normal annual additions. This assumption was grounded in the belief that county demographics were essentially static. Field experience of the contracted 911 mappers and common sense observation proved otherwise. Development is occurring quickly throughout the county and the county basically is unable to keep up with it. The current budget impasse in county government is the surface manifestation of RUTZ generated conflicts that cannot be resolved within the framework of inherited politics or organization.
While agriculture is still economically important, this agriculture is now conducted in a county that is quickly losing its agricultural character. Residential and recreational development have visually transformed the county particularly in all the area contiguous to Tims Ford lake. Continued housing development, driven by a spiral of property taxes/infrastructure costs, will accelerate this process throughout the county. At the same time, many in-migrants to the county are bringing with them not only new speech accents but new expectations and attitudes about community life. These in-migrants exhibit a wide economic range from the rapidly increasing numbers of alien workers to professional and technical people who are part of the larger industrial growth of the region.