Drive south on Nolensville Road past the future Kroger and Publix sites, and you will hit a stretch of dirt, framing, and construction fencing that has been there for the better part of two years. Most people who live here already know something is going up. Fewer know what, and almost nobody seems to know when it will actually be finished.
Here is the claim worth sitting with: that construction site is not going to replace your Saturday morning. It sits a mile and a half from Town Hall, in a part of Nolensville Road that has never functioned as the town's center, and the people building it expect to still be building it well into the early-to-mid 2030s. The Nolensville you already know, the one with the Saturday-morning farmers market and the park with the walking trail, is not being paved over. It is about to get a second half, slowly, on a different block.
A Town That Never Had a Square
Nolensville was founded in 1797. In the nearly two and a quarter centuries since, it has never had a public square, the kind of central civic space that towns settled the same year typically built into their original plats. That absence is not an oversight so much as a description of how Nolensville grew: as a farming crossroads, then a bedroom community, with its actual gathering life happening in scattered, informal places rather than one designed civic center.
That changes with Nolensville Town Square, a 27-acre development on the west side of Nolensville Road, just south of Rocky Fork Road. The town's planning commission approved the project in February 2024 on an 8-1 vote, and a formal groundbreaking followed on November 21, 2024, an event that brought out multiple generations of the families who once owned the land alongside the development team now shaping it.
The Site Is Not Where You Think
If you picture a "town square" landing somewhere near the Historic Nolensville School, where the farmers market sets up every Saturday, or near Nolensville Park with its ballfields and walking trail, you would be picturing the wrong stretch of road. The actual site sits at 7375 Nolensville Road, about 30 minutes from downtown Nashville, roughly a mile south of the town's planned Publix and about a mile and a half from Town Hall. It is new ground, not a redevelopment of the historic core.
What is planned there, once fully built:
- More than 70,000 square feet of commercial space for retail, dining, and office use
- More than 400 residential units, a mix of multifamily apartments over retail, townhomes, manor houses, and live-work units
- A central lawn and flexible event space, along with a splash pad and pocket parks
- Half of the 27 acres kept as green and open space rather than built on
- Restoration of a historic cemetery already on the property, rather than removal
The developers, Land Innovations and The Rochford Companies, worked with Smith Gee Studio on the design. Assistant Town Manager Chuck Downham has described the scale of what is coming as something "unique in terms of development, not only here in Nolensville, but throughout the Nashville area."
"So many towns have lost their identity to suburban sprawl."
That line comes from David Horwath, President of Land Innovations, explaining why the project preserves half its acreage as open space. It is a direct acknowledgment that the easy version of this project would have paved the whole 27 acres and called it done. Instead, half of it stays open, and a cemetery that could have been quietly relocated is being preserved in place.
The Build Is Slower Than the Fence Suggests
Here is where residents watching the site tend to misjudge the timeline. The original planning documents called for phase one's vertical construction to start in spring 2024. It did not break ground until that November, seven months later. Phase two's vertical construction began in fall 2025. Phase three is scheduled to start this fall, in 2026, which means the version of the site you can see right now from Nolensville Road is still closer to the beginning of this project than the end.
How long the whole thing takes depends on which document you read. One estimate puts full build-out at five years. Another, filed with the same planning commission, puts it at seven to ten. Either way, this is not a project that finishes next year, or the year after. It is a decade-scale undertaking, phased deliberately, on a timeline that has already slipped once.
That slowness is not a flaw. It is the point. A 400-unit, 70,000-square-foot mixed-use district built in eighteen months would almost certainly look and feel like the sprawl Horwath was talking about avoiding. Built over most of a decade, in three phases, with builders announced only in March of this year for the residential portion, it has room to actually take shape as something specific to this town rather than a template dropped onto a former field.
What Doesn't Change This Fall
None of this touches the parts of Nolensville that already work. The Nolensville Farmers Market still runs Saturday mornings, 8 a.m. to noon, May through October, at the Historic Nolensville School on Nolensville Road, the same producer-only market that has been a fixture there for years. Come November, it shifts to 9 a.m. to noon at the same location for the winter season. That rhythm is not competing with anything happening down the road. The two are separated by real distance, and by what each place is actually for.
Nolensville Park, also described as sitting in the heart of historic Nolensville, keeps its walking trail, its dog park, its four youth baseball fields, and its football field exactly as they are. If your weekend routine already includes a lap around that trail with a dog on a leash, nothing about the new development changes that. It is not replacing the park. It is building a second, different kind of gathering space, one built around a central lawn and a splash pad rather than ballfields and shade trees.
That is the actual shape of what is happening here. Nolensville is not trading its historic center for a new one. It spent 227 years without a formal public square, built its social life instead around a school parking lot on Saturday mornings and a park with a walking trail, and is now adding a second hub down the road, on a timeline measured in years rather than months. Watch the fence come down in pieces, not all at once, and you will be watching it correctly.
If you are curious about how a project like this tends to move property values or buyer interest in the surrounding streets over the next several years, that is a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks Nolensville closely. Kayla Jarmon works this market block by block and is always glad to talk through what a change like this actually means for a specific address, not just the town as a whole.
