Sixteen Acres on Shelbyville Pike, and a Second Orange Box for the South Side

The land sits on the east side of Shelbyville Pike, a little south of Joe B. Jackson Parkway, across the road from the Murfreesboro Medical Clinic. Right now it is 16.78 acres of not much — the kind of flat, half-forgotten ground that sits quietly at the edge of a city until the city arrives. On paper it is still zoned for houses. If the plans on file get where they are going, it will hold a Lowe's.

Site plans are specific in the way site plans always are. The main building would run 107,136 square feet. The attached garden center would add another 30,360. Nothing would stand taller than 40 feet, and the lot would hold 305 parking spaces — 294 standard, 11 accessible. It would be Murfreesboro's second Lowe's, and the third in Rutherford County.

Why the south side keeps driving north

That second-store math is the whole argument, and anyone who lives south of the Square already understands it without being told. Murfreesboro's existing Lowe's sits off Old Fort Parkway, next to the Target shopping center. The county's other one is in Smyrna, off Sam Ridley Parkway West. Both are north. So a Saturday that begins with a broken fence post or a sheet of plywood ends with a drive up into Old Fort Parkway traffic, which is its own kind of home improvement project.

When the Planning Commission took the zoning question up on June 3, it recommended approval unanimously. Jami Averwater — a City Council member who serves as the commission's vice chairwoman — made the case in plain terms: the south side needs somewhere closer to shop, and moving some of those trips off Old Fort Parkway is worth something on its own. Commission chairman Ken Halliburton was not at that meeting.

The part that is still unfinished

Here is the wrinkle that makes this a longer story than a ribbon-cutting. The property is not in Murfreesboro. It lies in unincorporated Rutherford County, zoned RM — residential medium density, which is to say zoned for the houses that were once the obvious future of that road. The owner, Joe Avery Curtis Jr., has asked the city to annex it. Lowe's Home Centers has asked that it be rezoned to a Planned Commercial District, a category written around one specific plan rather than a general category of use.

A planning commission recommends. A City Council decides. That public hearing had not been scheduled as of the middle of September, which means the drawings are real, the vote is not, and the ground is still just ground.

The neighbors are already there, in any case. The plan shows a connection to Christie Knob Way, which serves the Tiger Hill townhomes. Walmart, RaceTrac and Pep Boys are within sight of the corridor, and a Chick-fil-A has been planned for the South Church Street area.

A road that keeps changing jobs

Shelbyville Pike is U.S. Highway 231, and before it was a commuter artery it was simply the road to Shelbyville — the way you got to Bedford County when getting to Bedford County was the point. It has been quietly promoted, decade by decade, into something else. Joe B. Jackson Parkway did the same thing on the east-west axis, and this November it gets a 120-pump Buc-ee's at the I-24 interchange, which will not make that stretch of pavement any calmer.

That is the real context for a hardware store. Murfreesboro has more than doubled in population since 2000, and the arithmetic of that growth eventually shows up as square footage on a rezoning agenda. Whether this particular 16.78 acres becomes lumber racks and a garden center is now a question for seven council members and a hearing date nobody has set yet.

Related coverage: 120 fuel pumps and 47 acres: Murfreesboro's Buc-ee's is aiming at a November opening · Four point three miles, a new bridge, and a finish line somewhere in 2030