A Tornado Took the Store and a Fire Finished It. This Weekend the Tractors Are Free to Climb.
There is a version of this story that is four lines long: kids can climb on tractors at an orchard this weekend, it is free, RSVP first. That version is true and it is also the least interesting thing about the place.
The full version starts in 1974.
The weekend itself
John Deere Touch A Tractor Day runs both days of Labor Day weekend at Breeden's Orchard, 631 Beckwith Road — Saturday, Sept. 5, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 6, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Children get to climb aboard real John Deere tractors and farm equipment and sit where the driver sits, which is the entire appeal and does not need improving on.
It is free, but it is not walk-up. Spots are limited and an RSVP is required, which in practice means the families who look it up on a Tuesday get in and the ones who remember on Saturday morning may not. Details are on the event listing.
Fifty-two years on Beckwith Road
Breeden's has been open to the public since 1974, when Tom and Marynell Breeden started letting people onto the property. For more than forty-five years after that it was simply theirs: peaches and apples, school field trips by the busload, and fried pies that any number of Wilson County adults can still describe from memory. That is a long time for a twelve-acre orchard to stay in one family's hands, and long enough that generations of local kids met their first peach tree here.
In December 2017 the Breedens handed it off. The Dorfman family — who came out of the comedy business, of all places — took ownership and, to their considerable credit, did not treat the purchase as a blank slate. They started planting. Three acres were cleared for new peach and apple trees across 2018 and 2019. A solar project went in the same stretch. Two of the groves were pulled out and replanted in staggered waves, one in 2021 and 2022, another in 2023 and 2024.
Then 2020
And then the year everybody in Mt. Juliet remembers for other reasons took the orchard too. A tornado hit the property, and a fire finished what the tornado started, and the original store — the building the fried pies came out of — was gone.
It came back because the neighbors put it back. That is the part worth sitting with. A twelve-acre fruit farm outside the city limits is not a business with a corporate parent to call; when the store burned, what it had was a customer base that had been coming since the Ford administration. The rebuild produced a new store and a new bakery, both open by 2024, and the pies and donuts came back with them.
Why there is an orchard here at all
None of this is accidental geography. When settlers reached Wilson County in the late 1700s and early 1800s they arrived carrying seeds and grafts and generations of fruit-growing habit, and they found ground that cooperated: rich clay soil and a genuine four-season climate, cold enough in winter to give fruit trees the dormancy they need and long enough in summer to finish a peach. Apples, peaches and pears took hold here early and stayed. Breeden's is not a novelty attraction that happened to land in Mt. Juliet. It is the surviving edge of something Wilson County has been doing for two centuries.
If you go
Early September is a good time to see the place working rather than posing. The orchard is open Tuesday and Wednesday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday through Saturday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., closed Mondays. Alongside the fruit there are handmade pies and donuts, plus orchard tours, field trips and seasonal classes for anyone who wants more than a photo of a toddler on a tractor seat.
And if the tractors fill up before you RSVP, the weekend is not lost — there are plenty of other free things on the Mt. Juliet calendar between now and the tree lighting.
