Closing Attorney & Title Services in Leiper's Fork, TN

Maybe it is a house in the village, maybe forty acres down the valley, maybe land your family has held for years and is ready to sell. The contract on the table is most likely the statewide Tennessee REALTORS form, and nothing in it was written with Leiper's Fork in mind. It will not tell you that the county drew a zoning district for this village alone, that the farm you are buying - or the one beside it - may carry an easement no later owner can shed, or that a driveway reaching the Natchez Trace may rest on a federal right-of-way. Each of those is easy to look into before you sign and hard to undo after.

Start with who makes the rules. Leiper's Fork has no city government; it is unincorporated, so Williamson County zones it, and the county's ordinance gives the village a district of its own, the Leiper's Fork Village District, written to carry out the county's Leiper's Fork Village Special Area Plan. The district has two halves. In the Village Core - roughly from Sycamore Street south to Old Hillsboro Road and east to Floyd Road - a house lot can be as small as 10,000 square feet, at up to four homes an acre. The rest is the General Village Subarea, with a one-acre minimum and two homes an acre. In both, the county can measure a new lot against the lots already standing on the same block face, and in the core a new building has to face the street, with its parking beside or behind it. Paying extra because the land could be split, or could take a second house? Ask the county which half the parcel sits in, and what its block face allows, before the price is agreed. ^‡‡

The middle of the village is on the National Register of Historic Places as the Leipers Fork Historic District: 18 acres roughly bounded by Joseph Street, Old Tennessee 96, Old Hillsboro Road and Sycamore Street, listed on July 1, 1998. By the Park Service's own account, that listing is an honor, not a rulebook - it puts no restrictions on a private owner unless the project involves federal funding, a federal license or a federal permit. What binds you is the county district: the lot sizes above, a 7,500-square-foot cap on nonresidential buildings and a two-story limit. Buying an old building to restore or enlarge? Hold the district standards up against your plans before you sign; the listing will not stop you, and the zoning might. ^‡‡‡‡

Some of the pasture around the village is open on purpose. The Land Trust for Tennessee signed its first conservation easement here in 1999, on 224 acres, and has since worked with more than 15 landowners in the area on over 2,500 acres. An easement like that permanently limits building on the land and dividing it, and it runs with the land: the day the deed is yours, so are its limits. The Land Trust walks each property once a year, usually between January and April, and Tennessee law says breaking an easement's terms does not by itself wipe the easement out. Tennessee also requires a conservation easement to be recorded with the county register, so there is a document to read. Before you sign for a farm here, or for land beside one, get the recorded easement and see what it rules out - the barn, the second house, the five acres you meant to sell to pay for the rest. ^{‡‡‡‡‡}

The Natchez Trace Parkway runs by the village, and the Park Service keeps one of the Parkway's district offices in Leiper's Fork. A lot that backs onto the Parkway borders federal land. In a 2014 planning document, the Park Service counted about 1,100 rights-of-way and 1,500 deeded easements across Parkway lands along the whole Parkway, many of them held by neighboring landowners, and a permit process for building inside them. If your driveway, a utility line or a fence crosses onto Parkway land, find the deed or grant that allows it before closing day. A survey of your own lot shows where the line is; it does not show whether you have the right to cross it. ^‡‡

Out past the village a house may run on septic, and some still have a well. Two county rules matter if you mean to change anything. Where Williamson County has no record of the existing septic system, it will not approve a remodel, a rebuild or an addition until a back-up area is identified on a plat or soil map. And no new septic tank or field can go within 50 feet of a well, in use or abandoned, unless the well is properly plugged under county supervision. Ask the county for the septic file and the seller for every well on the land before you sign, so the addition you are counting on is not stopped by a missing record. Land in greenbelt brings one more question. The lower tax stays with the land only if you reapply with the Assessor by March 15, and if the land stops qualifying, the county takes back three years of the savings - five for open space. Decide in the contract who pays that, before either side signs. ^‡‡