The One Saturday a Year Fieldstone Farms Turns Its Driveways Into a Flea Market

Walk Lexington Parkway or Black Horse Parkway on the first Saturday of October and you will see something that does not happen every day: folding tables lined up along the curb, kids' bikes and patio furniture spilling into the grass, and a steady trickle of cars with out-of-county plates working their way through the neighborhood's loop streets. It looks like any big community garage sale. It is not. It is the HOA's community-wide sale weekend.

Fieldstone Farms' homeowners' association has a rule that most residents know in passing but rarely think through: no yard, garage, moving, or estate sale is allowed in the neighborhood at any other time except the HOA's own community-wide sale weekends. Not a driveway sale on a random Saturday. Not a moving sale when a family lists their house. The rule applies across all 2,137 homes, and it is the reason the fall weekend turns into something closer to a small-scale flea market than a typical neighborhood sale.

Why the Restriction Makes the Sale Bigger, Not Smaller

Most Franklin neighborhoods let residents run yard sales whenever they want, subject to a city permit. In practice, that spreads the supply out. A shopper driving through on a given Saturday might find two or three tables scattered across a subdivision. Fieldstone Farms concentrates that activity on its designated community-wide sale dates, which means the fall sale draws from every section of the neighborhood at once, from the Reserve at Spencer Creek to the older streets closer to Hillsboro Road.

That concentration is also why the sale gets promoted well beyond the neighborhood's own residents. It runs in the Tennessean, in county publications, and on Craigslist, the same channels a citywide event would use, not the quiet word-of-mouth that covers most driveway sales. For an HOA-run event, that is an unusual amount of outside reach, and it is a direct result of the fact that these are the days buyers know they can count on finding multiple sales in one place.

Fieldstone Farms follows the same pattern every year: the fall sale lands on the first Saturday in October. This year that puts it on Saturday, October 3, running 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., rain or shine. Goodwill sets up at Hunters Bend to take donations starting around 11 a.m. and staying until the trucks fill up. Anyone planning to sell still needs a yard sale permit through the City of Franklin, the same requirement that applies to any sale inside city limits.

The Clubhouse Swap Runs on the Opposite Logic

A couple of weeks after the garage sale, the Clubhouse hosts a different kind of exchange entirely. The Fieldstone Farms Clothing Swap works as a direct trade rather than a cash sale. Residents drop items off at the Clubhouse in the weeks leading up to the event, then everyone swaps on the day itself. Whatever goes unclaimed at the end gets donated rather than returned.

The contrast with the garage sale is the point. The fall garage sale is the weekend the neighborhood opens its driveways to the wider county. The clothing swap closes the loop the other direction: it is for residents only, no outside traffic, no cash changing hands, nothing advertised past the neighborhood's own channels. Between the two events, Fieldstone Farms runs both versions of a community exchange in the same month, one built for scale and visibility, the other built for privacy and reuse.

The Trails Were Built to Get You Somewhere, Not Just Around

The same instinct that shapes the sale calendar shows up in how the neighborhood's amenities are laid out. Fieldstone Farms has five parks: Lynwood Park, Lexington Park, Black Horse Park, Stanley Park, and Susie Sims Park, connected by a network of paved paths that residents can walk or bike without ever leaving the community. Lynwood Park is also home to the neighborhood's only dog park and its single pickleball court, which makes it the default stop for anyone with a leash or a paddle, regardless of which section of Fieldstone Farms they live in.

The two pools sit at opposite ends of that same network. Club West, at 1530 Lexington Parkway, is the larger of the two and shares its address with the main Clubhouse and fitness center. Club East, at 501 Black Horse Parkway, is the smaller neighborhood pool. The Fieldstone Flippers swim team practices at Club West, and both pools, along with the fitness center and the tennis and pickleball courts, run on a Brivo Mobile Pass system now that the old key fobs no longer work. Anyone who has not set up a Brivo account yet will want to before pool season winds down and holiday amenity use picks up.

What sets the trail system apart from most Franklin subdivisions is where it actually leads. The paths connect to Hillsboro Road, which gives residents walkable access to shops and restaurants without a car, something most Franklin neighborhoods simply do not offer. Herban Market, a short walk or bike ride off the trail system, is one of the businesses residents already treat as a neighborhood stop rather than a destination that requires driving. In a city where most errands mean getting in the car regardless of how close the destination is, that kind of direct trail-to-storefront connection is worth using while the weather still allows for it.

The Rest of the Fall Calendar

Beyond the garage sale and the clothing swap, the neighborhood has a few other fixtures that show up every year, even if the exact date shifts:

• Boo Bash, the Clubhouse's annual trunk-or-treat, closes out October with a costume contest, inflatables, and refreshments.
• The Fall Clothing Swap follows the garage sale by about a week and a half, with drop-offs accepted at the Clubhouse in the days leading up to it.
• Cookies with Santa returns to the Clubhouse in December, with RSVP time slots for photos and a stretch of open time afterward for cookies and crafts.

None of these require leaving the neighborhood, and taken together with the pool schedule, the trail network, and the twice-a-year sale restriction, they say something about how Fieldstone Farms is actually run. This is not a subdivision where the HOA exists to enforce paint colors and mailbox styles. It is one that has made a handful of deliberate choices, limiting yard sales to concentrate them, building trails that connect to something instead of just circling back, and running a full slate of Clubhouse events, that add up to a neighborhood functioning less like a collection of individual lots and more like one shared space with a calendar of its own.

If you already live here, none of this is news exactly, but it is easy to lose track of how the pieces fit until you see the fall calendar laid out together. If you are trying to picture what a specific section of Fieldstone Farms actually offers, from trail access to pool distance to which parks are walkable from a given street, Loy Hardcastle has spent decades working Franklin and Williamson County neighborhoods just like this one and can walk you through what any particular address means in practice. Let's Connect.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.