Experience Tennessee Visitor's Guide October 2021

e e s s e n n e T e c Experien

issue 6 | October 2021

monthly visitors guide

downtown tennessee

Lynnville wartrace Manchester

Leiper's Creek Gallery Celebrates 20 years Bonnaroo Cancels & the Community Responds Inside Hook: Meet the Small Town Artisan producing the country's best pipes

e m o c l We

The Experience Tennessee Monthly Visitors Guide is

brought to you by the South Central Tennessee Tourism Association. We are a non-profit organization dedicated to engaging visitors and enhancing their experiences in the great state of Tennessee.

We humbly ask you to join us on Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube as we launch this exciting new digital experience for our friends looking to make a visit to Tennessee. Your support is greatly appreciated, and we look forward to engaging with you in the months to come!

EXPERIENCE TENNESSEE TABLE OF CONTENTS NEW EXPERIENCE TN TOURS APP DOWNLOAD NOW!

Downtown Tennessee - Lynnville

04

- Manchester

06

- Wartrace

Nashville's Big Back Yard looks back on One Year

08

10

Meet the small-town artisan making the country's best pipes

13

20 Year's of Lisa Fox's Leipers Creek Gallery

15

Bonnaroo Cancels, The Other Fest is born, and how a community rallied to make Lemonade out of Lemons

19

The Webb School Art & Craft Show is back for 2021

24

EXPERIENCE TENNESSEE

PAGE 4

DOWNTOWN TENNESSEE

FEATURING: LYNNVILLE, MANCHESTER, & WARTRACE

BY ELENA CAWLEY

LYNNVILLE

Welcome to the historic and picturesque Lynnville’s downtown, which promises an escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Appreciate the architecture and enjoy a wonderful dining and shopping experience when you visit Lynnville.

Lynnville has 59 properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. One of them is the structure housing the Soda Pop Junction. Step back in time when you enter the restaurant and try the famous “Big Johnny Burger,” voted best hamburger in the state. The eatery is in a building that was built in 1860. It was used as a drug store from 1928 to 1978 and still has the original 1950s soda fountain. Enjoy live music at the restaurant every Friday and Saturday.

“For sweet and spicy flavors, visit 31 South BBQ, where you’ll find succulent smoked pork, chicken and brisket. Lynnville EZ Stop serves burgers, pizza, seafood and salads. Lynnville Fried Pie Company will tempt you with fried pies, truffles and cupcakes.

Enjoy a one-of-a-kind shopping experience at the Great American Leather Company, where you’ll discover handcrafted leather goods designed by Colonel Littleton and handmade in Lynnville. The company has been in business since 1987.

Explore the Lynnville Railroad Museum, presenting a collection of railroad relics, from model trains and ticketing stations to historical books.

Lynnville’s downtown hosts multiple events. One of them is the Lynnville Blackberry Festival, welcoming guests in July.

No need to rush and return to everyday reality and errands. Cozy bed and breakfast establishments invite you to stay and relax. One of them is Milk and Honey, a dreamy cottage offering an atmosphere that will help you rest.

While you’re in the area, visit Lexington Vineyard and Winery and Big Machine Distillery.

The winery provides a relaxing experience, tasting delicious wines, friendly conversation and learning about Tennessee grapes. The Big Machine Distillery features 28 acres of picturesque rural farmland and a tasting room, where you can try the handmade craft spirits.

MANCHESTER

The historic Coffee County Courthouse and local businesses welcome you to Manchester’s downtown, where an abundance of boutiques, eateries, arts and entertainment will make your experience memorable. The courthouse is home to Joanna Lewis Museum of Coffee County History, which preserves the heritage of Coffee County and Tennessee.

When you enter the shops, you’ll discover friendly service and wonderful merchandise.

Outfits that will enhance your personality and add a bit of sassiness await you at the Southern Diva Boutique. Reese’s Genes Boutique offers women's and children's clothing, seasonal items, home décor and accessories. Nature enthusiasts and lovers of comfortable style, stop by Owen’s Provisions and Apparel.

High Cotton Vintage Home Furnishing is in a gorgeous house at 213 N. Spring St., Manchester, and the boutique is always stocked with beautiful women’s clothing, purses, home furnishings and unique gifts.

You’ll discover a variety of gifts, home décor, furniture and locally-made goods at the Cracked Pot. The Cracked Pot will give you an enjoyable time browsing and help you decorate your home, making it cozy and maintaining your style.

The Mercantile Café serves classic comfort food and fresh-baked goods and a hearty portion of hospitality. The recipes feature nature’s best ingredients and made-fromscratch offerings.

At the Harvest Local Foods, local products adorn the shelves. You’ll find produce and flowers, salsa, bread, meat, handmade crafts and jewelry.

Visit the Manchester Arts Center for arts and entertainment. Local artists display their work at the center and performers brighten up the stage with their talents. The center also offers art classes for children and adults.

Manchester is also rich in street art. Vivid murals add colors to walls and enhance the experience of those who lay eyes on them. Artist Tara Aversa’s mural, an American flag in the shape of a magnolia, will inspire you with its patriotic motifs.

You’ll often find arts and crafts vendors and music events in downtown Manchester. The square hosts various events, including Coffee County Farmers Market, Manchester Veterans Day Parade and Christmas Parade.

WARTRACE

Green rolling hills will take you to the downtown area of Wartrace, Bedford County, where residents and business owners will greet you with a smile and treat you as a friend. They will entertain you with stories about the rich history of the town, which goes back centuries. The settlement became known as Wartrace Depot, when Tennessee's first railroad was built through the county in 1852.

Known as the cradle of the Tennessee Walking Horse, Wartrace invites you to learn its history and enjoy a unique shopping and dining experience. The town’s historic buildings house shops, filled with handmade treasures and interesting pieces, new and vintage. The stores provide opportunities for local artists to exhibit their artwork, which enhances the visitors’ experience. You will discover cozy eateries, with tasty options on their menus.

Visit Tennessee Walking Horse National Museum, which documents the history and heritage of the Tennessee Walking Horse. The museum preserves artifacts, documents and photographs and invites you to learn about the rich history of the Tennessee Walking Horse.

Not only does the Bellamy Café and Diner offer delicious sandwiches to customers but it offers entertainment. The café provides a stage to musicians from the area. The diner also displays paintings of local artists, adding color and charm to the place.

Find vintage pieces, home décor items and handcrafted gifts at the Rusty Bee. Purchase handmade jewelry to add character to your outfit and candles to add nice fragrance for your home. Stop by the Shoppes at 31 Main for Wartrace souvenirs, antiques, farmhouse decor, clothing and accessories, Christmas decorations, yard art and handcrafted items from local artisans. When you enter the Sparrow’s Nest, you will find not only unique gifts, local honey and jams but a “gathering place for kindred spirits” and free books.

Wartrace events, such as the town-wide yard sale and the Wartrace MusicFest, bring talented musicians, food trucks and games to the downtown area of the historic railroad town.

Nashville's Big Back Yard looks back on one year; Regional Movement, Zoomed into Being, Promotes Rural Quality of Life LEIPER’S FORK, Tenn. –Launched entirely via Zoom meetings, and with the assistance of spokesman Mike Wolfe, History’s American Picker, Nashville’s Big Back Yard is celebrating the accomplishments of year one. A regional movement of 12 rural Middle Tennessee communities and The Shoals of North Alabama, the organization is taking stock of the year’s success.

With an aggressive PR and social media effort and a grassroots approach to marketing, Nashville’s Big Back Yard achieved more than 270 million media impressions, engaged more than 50,000 social media followers, and received hundreds of inquiries from people drawn to rural living, remote work, and an affordable lifestyle.

NBBY’s comprehensive website achieved in-excess of 100,000 UVM’s and pageviews combined. The site showcases all the towns in the Big Back Yard with robust content stunning photography, professional videos, real estate information, tourism and relocation stats, and detailed contact information.

Nashville’s Big Back Yard is the result of lengthy conversations during COVID-19 spearheaded by Leiper’s Fork philanthropist Aubrey Preston and led by community leaders in a region long known as a destination for musicians, artists, and other creative talent. Debbie Landers serves as the organization’s executive director.

NBBY was created to increase travel and tourism to the region and capture the interest of people in pursuit of a simpler way of life. Nashville’s Big Back Yard includes the Middle Tennessee towns of Centerville, Clifton, Collinwood, Hampshire, Hohenwald, Leiper’s Fork, Linden, Loretto, Mount Pleasant, Santa Fe, Summertown, and Waynesboro in Middle Tennessee and The Shoals region of Northwest Alabama – Florence, Sheffield, Muscle Shoals.

Mike Wolfe’s participation as spokesman is inspired by his passion for the backroads of America and a love for Tennessee, where he resides in the Big Back Yard. Wolfe’s involvement, including a video endorsement, helped catapult the initial launch of NBBY to more than 90 million PR impressions and multiple thousands of social media engagements.

“Initially, NBBY was launched as a result of COVID-19’s devastating blow to our nation’s public health and economy, which led people and communities to think about who we are and what we do,” said Preston, who has spent more than 25 years working on rural preservation efforts including the popular Americana Music Triangle. “The success of our first year confirms what we already knew. The land is calling people back, and Nashville’s Big Back Yard has an abundance of land, water and world-class music. It’s a great place to visit and an even better place to live. We’re inviting people to come and play in our big back yard.”

Looking ahead, the Big Back Yard partners anticipate their first in-person meeting in November to celebrate the one-year anniversary and the success of Nashville’s Big Back Yard, a movement created entirely via Zoom.

Visit https://www.nashvillesbigbackyard.org

Meet the Small-Town Artisan Producing the Country’s Best Pipes

BY CAROLINE EUBANKS Tobacco pipes aren’t just for Sherlock Holmes wannabes anymore. Just ask Pete Prevost, owner of the nearly decade-old BriarWorks, one of the country’s only pipe factories.

Originally from Bakersfield, California, Prevost moved to Tennessee in 2005 to be involved in the music industry. He toured with the Grammy-nominated Christian rock band Sanctus Real, spending about 200 days on the road each year. He was looking for a change and he found it in an unlikely place.

After befriending fellow musician (of the band Newsboys) and fellow pipemaker Jody Davis, Prevost became interested in them. He first purchased antiques from stores before making his first from a DIY kit. He made a few more pipes, selling them at trade shows. By 2013, his hobby turned into a business, and he gave up his life of constant touring.

Read More: https://www.insidehook.com/article/style/briarworks-artisan-countrys-best-pipes

visitmaury.com

Lisa Fox’s “Leiper’s Creek Gallery” Celebrates 20 Years of Fine Art and Ultra-fine Hospitality

Leiper’s Creek Gallery is unexpected, especially as fine art galleries go. First off, it’s quite a surprise to find a world-class art gallery in the tiny village of Leiper’s Fork. Almost as astonishing is to discover sincere Southern hospitality in a place that might be perceived as high-falutin. Leiper’s Creek Gallery is anything but.

The fact that fine art can co-exist in a friendly place is thanks to proprietor Lisa Fox. She pays as much attention to extending hospitality as she does to choosing the art exhibited in her gallery. “They are of equal importance to me,” Fox says.

An artist in her own right, Fox carries the soul of the place squarely on her shoulders, making all decisions about exhibiting artists, attending to every detail of design and welcoming visitors as if she’s swinging wide the front door to her own home to invite in old friends.

From its 2001 beginning, Leiper’s Creek Gallery charted a unique path to distinguish its place in the world of successful, fine art galleries. Staking claim to a former gas station in the unincorporated village of Leiper’s Fork, with a miniscule population of 650, in rural middle Tennessee, came with some definite risks.

What Leiper’s Creek Gallery brings to the community and to its customers can be wrapped up in one word - authenticity. That, it seems, is the reason for the success of the gallery, now celebrating 20 years in business.

Among the celebrated at Leiper’s Creek Gallery are four Master Artists – Roger Dale Brown, Dawn Whitelaw, Anne Blair Brown, and Marc Hanson. Of the 23 artists exhibited, 17 are local.

Each one featured is already established either nationally or internationally and has a distinctive style with brilliant technical abilities. All are award-winning. Exceptional art is important, but equally important to gallery owner Lisa Fox is that each featured artist is a person who pursues the highest and best not only in their art, but also in their life.

In addition to the art, Lisa created a homey ambience in this former gas station turned gallery. She invited Robin Rains, of Robin Rains Interior Design, to bring in her fine furnishings to stage and sell along with the art. The modern contemporary and antique mix works perfectly with the eclectic collection of art. The furniture creates a setting to relax, decompress and experience a true sense of place. The furniture provides a perspective of how the artwork might look in a private home. And staying a while gives the visitor time to enjoy the aesthetic of the historic building, including the alluring fireplace and 15-foot ceilings.

Then there’s Abigail, Abby for short. She’s the pit bull/lab Lisa rescued who is widely known as the friendliest mixed-breed dog to ever take-up residence in a fine art gallery. To this Lisa Fox says, “Bring your kids, bring your dog.” And she means it.

Don’t worry, no dogs, or kids for that matter, have ever run amuck. Somehow, when people, all people, walk through the doors of Leiper’s Creek Gallery, a warm, sincere feeling of welcome takes hold. It’s like they’ve walked into a favorite aunt’s place, where no matter how busy she is, or how pristine her home appears, no matter how expensive the furniture or how precious her art and collectibles, you are always made to feel at home.

Welcome to Leiper’s Creek Gallery. Come and see us.

Bonnaroo cancels, the other fest is born. How a community rallied to make Lemonade out of lemons

By: Joshua Grosch With 48 hours to go the long awaited, much shifted but highly anticipated return of that weekend of bliss and music we know as Bonnaroo was set to return. The town was a buzz visitors were on their way and the stages were set, however Mother Nature had other plans. Hurricane IDA brought torrential amounts of rain and rendered many parts of the festival grounds unusable.

So with broken hearts event organizers did what they wanted to do the least. Bonnaroo would have to be cancelled and we would have to wait another year for our five days of musical nirvana leaving thousands who had already made or started their journey to Tennessee as refugees with no home for their weekend plans. So as Bonnaroo set to breaking down the months of hard work and prepping it for next year the citizens of Manchester and the Chamber of Commerce had what would seem to be a crazy idea.

Fast forward to forty-eight sleepless hours later, food trucks and vendors have rolled into Common John brewing and Bites of Europe, stages and lighting have been set and bands have been booked. Manchester Tennessee was throwing its first Other Fest. Thursday night Devin Hale took the stage at Common John for a solo set with so much charisma it filled the stage as if he’d brought his whole band and the magic of the weekend was under way.

Friday night after some minor technical delays Big Something took the stage Rumble style as memebers of Andy Frasco and the U.N. took turns joining them onstage. The air was right the sound was on point and if you stood at the edge of the twilight, closed your eyes and listened to the screaming guitars you could feel Bonnaroo. The grounds weren’t there but the spirit was the same.

Andy Frasco took the stage and turned the heat up and brought the fun back to making lemonade out of lemons. The high point of the whole weekend for me was their joint cover of Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel with the guys from Big Something. It’s kind of fuzzy and it’s been almost a month now if memory serves me they closed out with Dancin’ Around My Grave which is currently available wherever you digitally get music.

(I’m streaming it as we speak) There were so many great musicians to come through Manchester that, just like Bonnaroo, I didn’t get to see them all. Saturday’s headliner Kid Politics brought amazing energy and instantly catchy hooks to the stage for a night no one there will soon forget.

Sunday I was too tired to move. Common John closed out the festival at their place and I closed my eyes to reflect on this briefly crazy journey we had just went on. From excitement to disappointment to amazement I look forward to seeing what 2022 bring for Bonnaroo and also for The Other Fest.

Download NOw! TOURS APP

Experience all of your favorite trips, trails, and tours on the all new Experience Tennessee Tours App.

Bell Buckle really missed you and is so happy to welcome you all back! We know you missed this classic show last year. We know you’ve been revving up for it this year! And everyone is going to smile all weekend when the Bell Buckle Chamber of Commerce’s annual Webb Art and Craft Show’s returns Saturday, October 16 and Sunday, October 17.

Exhibitors have been gearing up for this for two years so this is going to be the bonanza of bonanzas! Good things come to those who wait! Everyone’s favorite show is back!

The Webb Art & Craft Show located on the Sawney lot on Maple Street is the classic fall show complete with juried exhibitors perfecting their crafts that features handmade arts and crafts such as pottery, metal works, wood working, textiles, jewelry, old fashioned soaps and lotions just to name a few. What you find at the Webb Art & Craft Show is that all the familiar things are back with new exhibitors as well. Something old, something new…. Ever heard that before?!

The Webb Show is the crown jewel of the entire weekend showcasing the finest of the finest in town. In addition to the popular exhibitors located at the site of the original Webb Art & Craft show is an all world food truck offering. And we do mean All-World, as in food choices showcasing a variety of cuisine from all over the world. Enjoy your favorite eats while listening to live music. In keeping with the fun fall festival atmosphere, a hay bale seating area is located next to the food trucks including live music. After all that shopping, you’re going to need to sit a spell to get ready for the afternoon shift!

The Bell Buckle ambiance and hometown friendliness are part of the knock out experience that makes this show the pilgrimage that it has become. In addition to the Webb Art & Craft Show which has been named the favorite show by readers of the Tennessee magazine for over ten years straight, there are more than 700 other booths in town to explore.

This Show has grown to such proportions in recent years that the Bell Buckle Chamber of Commerce has been putting up a map on their Facebook page to direct visitors to the best places to park as well as locations for handicap parking, porta toilets, first aid stations, and so forth. Please be sure to reference the Bell Buckle Chamber Facebook page or www.bellbucklechamber.com to help you plan your day as well as to help navigate through some of the traffic that also comes with the weekend. The city streets will be closed to traffic but open for fun all weekend!

The best place to park to get to the Webb Show is the ball fields at Webb School.

Though there are plenty of parking lots on all sides of town, the Webb lot is the closest to the juried show. There will be a Boy Scout troop on site to direct parking.

The Bell Buckle Chamber of Commerce Facebook page will be updated continuously throughout the day with live traffic and parking updates as well as any other announcements that are needed that will make your day easier and safer.

The perfect show, the perfect place, the perfect town for it all! Visitors can’t get enough of the Bell Buckle Webb Art & Craft Show and all there is to experience. The Show works so well because of the high standards of artisans, the neighbor style friendliness, and because, well, it’s Bell Buckle!

Bell Buckle, Tennessee – Close to home, but a world away!

For more information, please contact the Bell Buckle Chamber of Commerce visit our web site at www.BellBuckleChamber.com.

To download photos of the Bell Buckle Webb Art & Craft Show, please go to www.BellBuckleChamber.com

n i s u J o in

e e s s e n T en Let's Be Social!

e e s s e n T en

s w e r B & , s e in Whiskey, W 9 Distilleries, 9 Wineries, 6 Breweries, and several specialty locations!