Downtown Franklin

Franklin's Victorian-era Main Street: 16 blocks of 19th-century storefronts on the National Register, 20 miles south of Nashville. It won a Great American Main Street Award in 1995 from the National Main Street Center.

The town was founded in 1799, and the downtown blocks run Federal to Victorian. The Gothic Revival Hiram Masonic Lodge No. 7, built in 1823, is the district's oldest public building.

Gray's on Main occupies an 1876 brick Victorian that ran as a drugstore for 91 years. Gray Drug Co. closed in 2004, and the building sat empty for 8 years.

Andy Marshall sold his Piggly Wiggly stores to buy the 1950s Puckett's in Leiper's Fork in 1998, then opened the downtown Franklin restaurant in 2004: meat-and-three plates, smoked BBQ, and songwriters on a small stage.

The Franklin Theatre went dark in 2007, then reopened June 3, 2011 after the Heritage Foundation raised over $8M to restore it. Chubby Checker, Taj Mahal, and the Indigo Girls have played the room since.

When Gray's reopened on August 4, 2013 after an 18-month restoration, the city closed Main Street and 3,000 people watched the old drugstore's neon sign come back on.

JJ's Wine Bar, Franklin's first, pours 28 wines from smart-card taps at the corner of Main Street and 2nd Avenue, in a National Register building that began as a private residence.