COMMUNITY OF CREATIVITY
SANTA FE
Santa Fe (pronounced Santa FEE, like TennSEE) is a best-kept-secret kind of place that draws all flavors of city dwellers. It’s pretty much exactly what folks picture when they dream of soaking up long country sunsets and keeping a few chickens on an honest patch of land. Located just 50 miles southwest of Nashville, this unincorporated community and its small neighboring villages knit together to form a friendly, connected mix of lifelong residents and eclectic transplants. For some, it’s a just-right blueprint for the modern rural escape.
Old Town, New Life
There’s something about Santa Fe that draws creative entrepreneurs together. In the last decade, the town has welcomed a brilliant new crop of people leaving their corporate gigs to farm, create, or translate their urban experience to rural living. Makers. Healers. Shop owners. Growers. And of course, plenty of musicians.
Entrepreneurs dig in
Here among the burbling creeks and forested acres, a midwife and physician blend conventional and holistic medicine via the Wild Healers podcast. A family leads curious visitors through a sustainable living experience, including a magical stay in permaculture “Hobbit Houses” at Forest Gully Farms. And plenty of next-gen farmers are homesteading and harvesting here. From the musician-farmer couple of the aptly named Farm and Fiddle to the Ivy League Peace Corps duo behind Athena’s Harvest Farm and Training Center, farmers in Nashville’s Big Back Yard are changing the world one crop at a time.