Land Trust for Tennessee
The Land Trust for Tennessee is an American non-profit organization for protecting Tennessee's natural, scenic and historic landscapes and sites. Since it was founded in 1999 by Jean C. Nelson and Phil Bredesen, the Land Trust has conserved nearly 100,000 acres (400 km2) of land in Tennessee. The organization's principal office is in downtown Nashville, and it has an office and outdoor work space at Glen Leven Farm in Nashville and a regional office in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Land Trust is a fully accredited member of The Land Trust Alliance.
Of the 300 projects the Land Trust has completed across the state, more than 100 of those are working farms consisting of 27,000 acres, and 18 of those are “Century Farms” owned and continuously operated by the same family for more than 100 years.
Farms and forests account for more than 90 percent of Tennessee’s landscape, and farming and forestry account for 14.7 percent of the state’s economic activity. The heaviest concentrations of the Land Trust’s conserved farms are in the fast-growing Middle Tennessee counties around Nashville, in two parts of the Tennessee Valley, Upper East Tennessee, and the counties surrounding Chattanooga in the southeastern region of the state.
The Land Trust partners with Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, the National Park Service and local governments to acquire and protect land for public use.
The Land Trust also supports the protection of scenic landscapes visible from public land, rivers and roads. The Land Trust has protected 175 miles of scenic public road frontage and more than 27,000 acres that are open to the public for recreation.
Of the 100,000 acres that the Land Trust has protected, 44,000 of those are on the Cumberland Plateau, the western-most Appalachian range in southeast Tennessee. The Land Trust has worked to expand land and public access to South Cumberland State Park, Fiery Gizzard, the Mountain Goat Trail, Fall Creek Falls, Burgess Falls and (in cooperation with Sewanee, The University of the South) Lost Cove and Shakerag Hollow. The Land Trust holds conservation easements on public parkland to ensure that it will forever be used for parks and public recreation. Some of these parks include Shelby Farms Park in Memphis, Tenn., Nashville’s old growth Hill Forest addition to the Warner Parks, Fairview’s Bowie Nature Park, and Harlinsdale Farm Park in Franklin, Tenn.
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