The Gate Is Locked at Mt. Juliet’s Busiest Dog Park, and a Sidewalk Is the Reason
If you have pulled into the lot off Belinda Parkway some evening in the last couple of weeks and found the gate shut, you did not miss a memo. Mt. Juliet's most-used dog park is closed, and it has been since the middle of August.
The city's notice is short and unambiguous: Will Sellers Dog Park has been closed since August 19, and it is closed until further notice. Crews are installing a sidewalk at the site, and while that work is underway the parking lot is unavailable as well. No reopening date has been posted.
For a certain slice of this town, that is a genuine disruption. Sellers is the one people actually drive to — the roughly three-quarter-acre space off Southeast Springdale Drive, with the fence line splitting the small dogs from the ones who need the room. It is the closest thing Mt. Juliet has to a standing 6 p.m. social club, and its regulars know each other's dogs by name long before they know each other's.
Who Will Sellers was
The name on the sign is not decorative. The park carries it in honor of Will Sellers, who spent years in service to Mt. Juliet both as a city employee and as an elected official. Naming a dog park after someone is a particular kind of municipal compliment — it is not the ceremonial plaque in a lobby that nobody reads. It is the place where a few hundred neighbors show up every single week, in the rain, because the dog does not care about the weather.
Why a sidewalk, and why now
A sidewalk sounds like a small thing to close a park over. It is not, really. The lot and the approach are the whole front door of the site, and pouring concrete next to an active parking area with dogs coming off leashes is not a combination anyone wants to supervise. Closing it outright is the conservative call.
It also fits a pattern regulars will recognize. The city has taken Sellers offline before — most routinely in early spring, when the grass gets over-seeded and fertilized and given a few weeks to establish itself. Heavy year-round use is hard on turf, and the fall and winter months turn the worn patches to mud. The park gets rested on purpose. This closure is different in cause but similar in spirit: short-term inconvenience, better ground underfoot afterward.
Where to go in the meantime
Mt. Juliet has other fenced options, and this is the moment to learn them.
South Mount Juliet Bark Park is the obvious substitute — a bark park with a pavilion, a playground, and sand volleyball on site, which makes it an easier sell if you are bringing a kid along with the dog.
Jones Family Park also has a bark park, and it comes attached to a disc golf driving range and sand volleyball courts. If you have ever wanted an excuse to throw discs badly while your dog does laps, the excuse has arrived.
Both are city parks, both are free, and neither is far. For hours, current conditions, or confirmation that a gate is actually open before you load the dog into the car, the city can be reached at 615-754-2552, and the Parks & Recreation office keeps hours Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and Sunday afternoons from 1 to 4:30.
A reasonable expectation
“Until further notice” is the phrase that makes people nervous, but it is usually just a city declining to promise a date it cannot control. Concrete work is weather-dependent and inspection-dependent, and a park department that has quietly closed and reopened this same park on a seasonal schedule for years is not in the habit of losing track of it.
Watch the city's alert page, and check before you drive. And if your dog is the sociable type who has been moping since mid-August, note that Mt. Juliet does put on the occasional dog-forward event — Pickles for Pups at Charlie Daniels Park is on the calendar this fall. While you are collecting free things to do in town, our roundup of Mt. Juliet's free museums is a decent rainy-day backup for the humans.
