At a little after 9 a.m. on Saturday, April 27, 2024, a handful of Brentwood city commissioners pushed open a metal gate at Marcella Vivrette Smith Park and then stepped quickly out of the way. A pack of mountain bikers had been waiting behind them, and the commissioners knew enough not to stand in the path of a stampede. The riders pedaled past, disappeared into the woods behind Ravenswood Mansion, and became the first people to legally ride a mountain bike trail built for that purpose anywhere in Brentwood.

That sentence is the part most residents miss. Brentwood has had hiking trails at Smith Park since 2017. It has had six miles of them, well marked and dog friendly, winding through forest and field past a mansion built in 1825. What it did not have, until that April morning, was anywhere in the city limits to legally ride a mountain bike off pavement. The land for it had been sitting there since 2011.

Thirteen years is the actual story

The idea that Smith Park could hold a bike trail system dates back to 2011, not long after the city started assembling the property from what had been Ravenswood Farm. For a decade it went nowhere, partly because early plans called for shared trails and neither hikers nor bikers were enthusiastic about that arrangement, and partly because getting bikes from a parking lot to a trailhead without crossing pedestrian paths turned out to be a harder design problem than anyone expected.

It moved because a nonprofit called Bike Walk Brentwood decided to stop waiting on the city to solve it alone. In 2021 the group signed a memorandum of understanding with city officials and started raising money, eventually collecting the fifteen thousand dollars needed just to pay for a professional trail design, before a single shovel of dirt moved. In February 2023, the Brentwood City Commission voted unanimously to approve the plan. A separate agreement gave the local chapter of the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association eighteen months to build the eastern half of the trail at its own expense.

That is an unusual amount of civic patience for what amounts to a bike path. It is also the reason the trail exists at all. Nobody handed Brentwood this amenity. A group of residents raised the money, negotiated the access issues, and then recruited the volunteers to dig it.

The same firm that shaped Bentonville

When it came time to actually design the route, Bike Walk Brentwood hired Rock Solid Trail Contracting, a company based in Bentonville, Arkansas, with a second shop in Copper Harbor, Michigan. If those names mean nothing to you, they mean everything to serious mountain bikers. Bentonville is one of the most recognized mountain biking destinations in the country, and Rock Solid is one of the firms that built it that way. The company has also shaped trail systems in Cuyuna, Minnesota, and other places riders travel specifically to visit.

Rock Solid flagged the route and set the design standards. Then hundreds of volunteers did the physical work, hiking through the undeveloped back acres of the park over a series of long days to clear the corridor by hand, following the professional's plan rather than improvising their own. One work session alone drew about seventy volunteers organized through the regional off-road cycling chapter. That hybrid model, professional design paired with volunteer labor, is how a park with essentially no construction budget ended up with a trail system designed by the same people who work in places riders fly in to ride.

The result is seven miles of single-track, split across four routes:

• Green Trail — a 2.2-mile loop favored by dog walkers, trail runners, and birders, with enough elevation change to feel like a real hike but nothing technical enough to intimidate a first-timer.
• Blue Trail — 2.4 miles that trace the park's perimeter, with sections of loose, rocky footing that push it past beginner territory.
• Black Trail — the technical heart of the system, staying mostly in wooded terrain with rockier sections that reward riders who already know what a berm turn is.
• Red Trail — the shortest but steepest climb in the park, ending at a scenic overlook that locals already rate as one of the better fall and winter views in Williamson County.

The trail begins near the southwest corner of the parking lot by the ball fields, climbs to a first ridge, then drops through hillside forest with linked berm turns before climbing again into the back fifty acres for the more advanced downhill lines.

Built by people who already needed it

Part of what pushed this project forward was that Brentwood already had riders with nowhere to train. In 2021, sixth-grade girls representing Brentwood took first and third place at the Tennessee state championship races for the National Interscholastic Cycling League, with a group of freshman boys finishing fourth. Those results came from kids who had been practicing on trails outside the city, because there was nothing to ride at home. One local parent, whose son started mountain biking at fourteen, pointed out that a home trail would let the middle school and high school teams actually train where they live instead of driving to find dirt.

That is a detail worth sitting with. This wasn't a park amenity added speculatively in hopes that demand would show up. The demand was already there, competing and placing at the state level, before the trail existed.

A park that named itself on purpose

The organizers behind the project made one more decision that separates Smith Park from a generic subdivision amenity. Rather than leave the trail segments as unlabeled color codes, Bike Walk Brentwood worked directly with the Brentwood Historic Commission on how the system would be presented to the public.

"We wanted this to be a true community amenity."

That's how one of the project's organizers put it after the ribbon-cutting, describing the deliberate choice to loop the city's own historical group into a mountain bike trail project. It is a small thing on paper. In practice it means the trail was built to read as part of Brentwood's continuous history rather than a modern insertion into an old landscape, sitting a few hundred yards from a mansion that has stood on this land since 1825.

The rest of the loop

None of this exists in isolation. Smith Park's mountain bike trails sit beside the six miles of hiking trail that opened in 2017, and a paved multi-use road now connects the park to the neighborhoods around it and to Brentwood's broader greenway system along the Little Harpeth River. A rider or a hiker can start at the ball field parking lot, work through any combination of the four trails, and roll straight out onto pavement without ever getting back in a car.

For residents building this into an actual weekend routine, Miss Peggy's Bark Park at Tower Park on Heritage Way rounds out the loop. It's split into a fenced acre and a half for large dogs and roughly two-thirds of an acre for small ones, with shaded benches and water stations at both, and it's open seven days a week from six in the morning until eight at night. A Saturday that starts on the Green Trail with the dog on a leash and ends at Miss Peggy's off leash is now a genuinely available option inside Brentwood's own borders, which was not true two years ago.

That is the actual shift here. Not that Brentwood added a bike trail, but that a park sitting mostly unused for over a decade turned into a system built by the people who needed it, designed by a firm with a national reputation, and named in collaboration with the city's own historians. It took thirteen years to get from an idea to a ribbon being cut. Anyone who rides it now is riding the result of that patience.

If you're already exploring what life looks like in different pockets of Brentwood, or wondering how amenities like this factor into a future move within the city, the team at Sarah Nicodemus knows this market from the ground up. Start your journey home — book a free consultation.