Three Generations, One Town
My grandfather Earl Whitfield started this business in 1978 with a single push mower and a wagon, cutting lawns around downtown Franklin to help pay for school that fall. It turned into a full-time trade within a couple of years, and he never went back.
My dad took it over in the ’90s as Franklin started growing fast — new subdivisions going up on what used to be farmland, and a lot more lawns than one crew with push mowers could keep up with. He’s the one who built it into a real company with a real program instead of just a mowing route.
I grew up riding along in the truck bed before I was old enough to run the equipment, and took over full-time after college. These days most of what I think about is the fact that Franklin isn’t one kind of lawn anymore — it’s old shaded fescue lots downtown and new full-sun bermuda lawns out toward Spring Hill, and a program that treats them the same is a program that’s wrong for half the town.
We’ve watched this town grow from a handful of stoplights to a real city — the lawns changed with it, and so did we.
