Drive past 1686 Sunset Road this month and you will see the usual signs of a town park under construction: silt fence, staked survey flags, a gravel access cut where the parking lot will go. If you know Nolensville's growth pattern, this looks like every other project the town has broken ground on in the last five years. It is not. The 20 acres taking shape here carry a name the town spent a year choosing, and the reason for that name sits about a quarter mile away, on private land most residents have never had a reason to walk up to.
The Park You'll Use Isn't The Park That Made This Land Matter
The town bought the 1686 Sunset Road parcel in July 2023 with a straightforward goal: more recreation space, more preserved open ground, a public gathering spot in a fast-growing corner of Williamson County. What's going in is exactly what you'd expect from a modern parks budget. A tennis and pickleball court. A basketball court. A multi-purpose grass field. A restroom building. Roughly 2,000 linear feet of paved walking trail, including a boardwalk crossing over a stream tributary, all funded in part through a state Local Parks and Recreation Fund grant. The same site is slated to eventually house Nolensville's new police headquarters.
None of that is what the Chrismon and Brown families are being honored for. The historic Sunset Park they built sits next door, still standing, still privately owned, and still largely unknown to the newer half of Nolensville's population.
What Ben And Mary Chrismon Built Between 1909 And 1929
Ben Chrismon was a shoe cobbler. Sometime between 1909 and 1929, he and his wife, Mary Polk Chrismon, founded an 11-acre recreation ground that became, according to the marker the Nolensville Historical Society later erected, the first ball diamond in Middle Tennessee open to African Americans, at a time when segregation barred them from the community's public parks. Families came by horse and wagon, later by chartered bus, for picnics, a three-hole golf course, ballgames, and reunions. The concession stand sold fried fish and homemade ice cream.
Two names connect Sunset Park to a wider story than most Nolensville residents realize. Woodrow Williams, born in Nolensville in 1917, started his career with the Nashville Stars before pitching for the Baltimore Elite Giants in the Negro National League from 1935 to 1941, a career that ended when a pitch broke his arm. And Ted Rhodes, born in Nashville in 1913, developed his golf swing hitting shag balls on Sunset Park's three-hole course while working as a caddie at Belle Meade Country Club, a club that wouldn't allow him membership. Rhodes went on to become the nation's first Black professional golfer.
In September 1929, the park hosted the second annual Williamson County Colored Agricultural Exhibition, drawing exhibitors showing produce, livestock, and handicrafts for an admission of 15 to 25 cents.
What Ten Years Under The Browns Preserved
The Chrismons operated the park until roughly 1929. In 1965, Thomas A. Brown Sr. and his wife, Jessie Boyd Brown, purchased it and kept it running for another decade, raising their own family in a home built adjacent to the grounds. As integration opened Nolensville's public parks and fewer visitors made the trip to Sunset Road, the park's active use faded. Today the original land is still held privately by Brown family descendants.
In 2006, the Nolensville Historical Society and the Williamson County Historical Society, joined by the African-American Heritage Society of Franklin and Williamson County, dedicated a historical marker on the site. More than 100 people attended.
A Public Vote, Then A Unanimous Resolution
The new park's naming process ran through the first months of 2026. The town collected 194 name submissions and 454 certified community votes. Chrismon-Brown Park won by the widest margin, and on March 5, 2026, the Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to make it official, with descendants of both families in the room.
Mayor Halie Gallik called the park's baseball diamond next door the first in Middle Tennessee to welcome African American players, and noted the town rarely gets a chance to formally recognize contributions that stretch across generations. It's a small civic gesture, a resolution and a sign, but it's the kind of gesture that only means something if people know what it's pointing to.
What's Actually Going In Right Now
The town issued its construction request for proposals in June 2026, with bids due by mid-July. As of late summer, work is underway on:
- One tennis and pickleball court
- One basketball court
- A restroom building
- One multi-purpose grass sports field
- A parking lot
- Roughly 2,000 linear feet of paved walking trail, including a boardwalk crossing a stream tributary
A separate sanitary sewer extension, running about 900 linear feet with new manholes and two stream crossings, was also bid out this summer to serve the site. None of this is finished yet. If you've been waiting for a specific opening date, the town hasn't published one, but the RFP timeline and the sewer work put the project solidly in an active construction phase heading into fall.
The Handoff Nobody's Talking About
Here's the part that gets lost if you only read the town's press release. The historic Sunset Park, the one the new park is named for, still exists as private property at 1670 Sunset Road, right next door to the construction. It didn't get demolished or absorbed into the new park boundary. It's still there, still in the Brown family's hands.
In June 2026, it hosted its first Juneteenth gathering, organized by Kimi Brown along with Friends of Mocha Nolo and Mason Health Collaborative, drawing residents for an afternoon centered on the site's history as a segregation-era gathering place for Black families across Middle Tennessee. That event happened on the original ground, not the new one.
So the town is building a modern park with pickleball courts and a police station a few hundred feet from a working piece of living history that most people driving down Sunset Road have never noticed, let alone visited. The new park will have signage and a name. The old one still has a family.
If you've lived in Nolensville for a while, you've probably watched Sunset Road change from a two-lane stretch past pasture into a construction corridor. What's easy to miss is that this particular project isn't just adding courts and trails to the town's inventory. It's the first time in recent memory that Nolensville has built something new specifically to point back at something old and ask people to remember it.
Next time you're out walking the new trail once it opens, look for the marker down the road. It's been there since 2006, waiting for more people to read it.
If you're the kind of resident who likes knowing the history behind the places you live near, and you ever want to talk about what's happening with home values or new development in this corner of Williamson County, Robert Young knows Nolensville the way locals do. Schedule your free market consultation whenever the timing's right for you.
