All 69 Tennessee state parks by drive time from Franklin

01The short version

Tennessee's Find a Park page lists 69 state parks in October 2026, and every one of them is within 330 road miles of the Public Square. Seven are inside an hour: Radnor Lake, the Bicentennial Capitol Mall, Harpeth River, Henry Horton, Long Hunter, Montgomery Bell and Cedars of Lebanon. Another 19 are inside two hours, among them seven of the 12 parks the state lists for waterfalls.

This guide times each drive from the square on OpenStreetMap's roads, with no traffic, and sets beside it what the state lists at the park: its trails and their lengths, whether you can swim, camp, rent a cabin or take a lodge room, and how many visits the park's own plan counted in a year. Each park has a page of its own with its trails, its campgrounds and the parks nearest it.

The counts change the picture. Radnor Lake, the nearest park, is one of the most crowded for its size, with 1.9 million visits counted in fiscal 2022 on 1,380 acres. Long Hunter and Montgomery Bell, each about 20 minutes farther, counted about a seventh as many visits per acre. Section 04 lists the parks with the most room, and two of them are within two hours.

03Inside an hour

Radnor Lake is the nearest, about 20 minutes away in south Nashville: an 85-acre lake inside 1,380 acres of woods, with trails for walking and watching wildlife and nothing else. Pets, runners and bikes are allowed only on Otter Creek Road, Hall Drive and the dam, and the park's plan lists parking as its first problem. The Bicentennial Capitol Mall, half an hour away downtown, is a park in name: a lawn below the Capitol, a granite map of the state and a carillon.

Harpeth River, 40 minutes away, is the river that runs through Franklin, farther downstream: launches for canoes and kayaks along 40 miles of it in Cheatham and Davidson counties, the Narrows and Montgomery Bell's 1820 tunnel. The park closes boating access when the river reaches five feet. Long Hunter, on Percy Priest Lake, has a swim beach and lakeside trails, among them the four-mile Day Loop. Henry Horton and Montgomery Bell are the two resort parks inside the hour, each with a lodge, cabins, a campground and a golf course. Cedars of Lebanon, just under an hour northeast, has 117 campsites by its plan and horse trails through its glades.

04Where there is room

Each park's strategic management plan opens with a fact sheet that gives its acreage and its visitors for one fiscal year, July to June. The counts are the parks' own, at least some of them from traffic counters at the gate that miss walkers and big events, as Radnor Lake's and Red Clay's plans note, and the years differ: 35 of the 55 parks with a count of their own report fiscal 2022, the rest 2024 or 2025. Read them as orders of magnitude, not as a ranking to the last visitor.

Divided by acreage, they say how much room a visitor gets. Radnor Lake counted 1,373 visits a year per acre, Cedars of Lebanon 1,634. Long Hunter counted 184 and Montgomery Bell 180, in later years. The eight parks below have at least ten miles of listed trail and fewer than 50 visits per acre. Two are within two hours: Savage Gulf, with nine visits per acre and ten campgrounds, all but one of them backcountry, and Edgar Evins on Center Hill Lake, with 42. Fall Creek Falls makes the list on its size alone, 25,568 acres.

Visits are the park plan's count for the fiscal year shown. Per acre is visits divided by the plan's acreage. Left out: parks without a plan, the Hiwassee and Ocoee parks, which share one count, and Big Ridge and Burgess Falls, whose plans print the same count.

Seven parks counted more than a million visits a year on their own. Two of them are inside the hour: Radnor Lake and Cedars of Lebanon. The Hiwassee and Ocoee parks, which share one plan, counted 2.5 million between them.

05Waterfalls

Twelve open parks list waterfalls, and seven of them are within two hours, all east and southeast of Franklin, where the rivers drop off the Highland Rim and the Cumberland Plateau. The nearest is Old Stone Fort at Manchester, about 70 minutes away, where trails follow the falls of the Duck and Little Duck rivers. The farthest is Frozen Head, three hours out.

Two of them ask more of you than parking. Reaching the base of the falls at Cummins Falls takes a Gorge Access Permit, and the route closes when the water rises, even on a dry day if it has rained upstream. At Rock Island, the gorge below TVA's Great Falls Dam closes whenever the dam is spilling or likely to release water, and TVA's schedule can change by the hour.

06Where to sleep

Forty-one open parks have camping, 21 rent cabins and six have a lodge or inn. The lodges are Henry Horton and Montgomery Bell inside the hour, then Natchez Trace, Paris Landing, Fall Creek Falls and Pickwick Landing. Camping runs from RV sites with water and power to backcountry sites reached only on foot, and a park's page lists each of its campgrounds with the kinds of site it has. The state's own count on its About page is 36 campgrounds and 373 cabins; the 41 here include parks whose only sites are in the backcountry.

Campsites, cabins and lodge rooms are booked on the state's reservation site or at 1-888-867-2757, up to a year ahead, or 13 months for a group of four or more cabins or ten or more lodge rooms. Cabins take two nights at least, three on some holiday weekends, and most campsites take two. Every camping reservation carries a $5 fee that is never refunded; cancel two or more days ahead and the rest comes back, the day before and you lose the first night, the same day and you lose two. A cabin cancelled 30 or more days out costs $10, 15 to 29 days out the first night, and 14 days or less all of it. A lodge room refunds in full up to 48 hours before arrival.

People 62 and older get 25 percent off standard camping in season and 50 percent in the off-season, and 10 percent on lodge rooms and park restaurants, but nothing on cabins. Tennessee veterans get 25 percent off cabins, campsites and lodge rooms all year and 50 percent on cabins and campsites from December through February, on bookings made within 30 days of arrival, and veterans with a 100 percent service-connected disability get 50 percent on cabins and campsites. The state asks for a driver's license or other photo ID showing age, and a DD214 or a VA card for service.

07What it costs, and the rules

Getting in is free. The state's FAQ says no state park charges an access fee, and none of the 69 park pages listed one on October 20, 2026. A rule the state adopted in 2010 still allows an entrance fee of up to $2 a person at parks it posts as fee areas, and a daily parking fee, but the state charges neither. The ticket a day visitor is likeliest to need is Cummins Falls' Gorge Access Permit, sold online only and required every day to reach the base of the falls; the overlook needs none, and the state shows the price only once you start to buy one. Rock climbing takes a free permit, and some backcountry campsites a reservation.

Most parks are open every day of the year, from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset, though each manager sets the hours: Radnor Lake opens at 6 a.m. and closes 20 minutes after sunset, and Montgomery Bell is open around the clock. Pets must be leashed or otherwise under control, and they are kept off beaches and out of pools, cabins and lodge rooms, except for a few lodge rooms and one cabin at each park set aside for them at $20 a pet a night. Swimming is allowed only at designated beaches, waters and pools.

The state's rule bans drinking in the open but allows it at campsites, in cabins and lodge rooms and on licensed premises; the parks' own policy page is stricter, and Cummins Falls bans alcohol altogether. Only certified heat-treated firewood may come into a park, or wood gathered off the ground near the campsite. A drone needs the park manager's written approval outside a designated flight zone. A visitor may pick up a few pebbles by hand; taking plants needs a permit, and artifacts are off limits.

The Tennessee State Parks Passport is a stamp book from any park's visitor center, stamped at each park; fill it and the state names you a Tennessee State Parks Ambassador.

08The new parks, and the closed ones

Tennessee had 53 state parks in 2010 and 56 in 2020. The state counts Dry Branch, dedicated on September 23, 2026, as its 68th, and Gov. Bill Lee's administration says the 14 parks it is establishing are the most any Tennessee administration has created. The list also carries Buffalo River, still a proposed park. The 70th, Angel's Hollow, on McDonald Farm where Hamilton and Rhea counties meet, was named on October 20, 2026 and is to be dedicated on November 6; it is not on the state's list yet, and this guide will add it when it is.

Three parks on the list are closed: Dry Branch, which is not open while the state plans it, Cardwell Mountain, closed while it is readied for visitors, and Buffalo River. Several of the newest open parks are thin on facilities so far. Devil's Backbone is one trail; Cherokee Trail of Tears, Clinch River Valley and Fort Southwest Point list no trails on their hiking pages yet.

Older parks changed shape too. The state split South Cumberland into separate parks, Savage Gulf in 2022 and then Fiery Gizzard and Head of the Crow in October 2025, and the old South Cumberland address now leads to Fiery Gizzard. The Ocoee River became its own park in September 2025, apart from the Hiwassee.

09How this guide was made

The park list, each park's address, coordinates, activities and amenities, and whether it has a campground, cabins or a lodge come from the map data on Tennessee State Parks' Find a Park page. Its trails come from each park's hiking page and its campgrounds from its camping page, read on October 20, 2026. The drive is Valhalla's route on OpenStreetMap's roads from the Public Square to the park office the state's map marks, with no traffic, rounded to five minutes; map apps that know the traffic will say something different. The county is the Census Bureau's, from the office's coordinates.

Acreage and visits come from each park's strategic management plan, the state's own documents. Where a plan's fact sheet and its history disagree, or a park's page gives a third figure, the guide prints the fact sheet and notes a large difference on the park's page. Parks opened since the plans were written take their acreage from the state's Future Parks page or have none. The guide covers the parks Tennessee State Parks runs; it leaves out the national parks, the Natchez Trace Parkway, the state natural areas and state forests that are not part of a park, and the campgrounds the TVA and the Army Corps of Engineers run on their lakes.

The state estimates its visitors from vehicle counts at each park, at 3.2 people a vehicle, by its 2024 economic impact study, which put the whole system at 22,516,407 visits in fiscal 2024. The plans' counts are the parks' own, for whichever year each plan reports, and the plans that say how they counted used traffic counters.

The rest of the field guides

Guide 01 is The Field Guide to American Ticks, the thing to read before any of these trails in summer. Guide 02 is Snakes of Middle Tennessee, and Guide 03 is Severe Weather in Williamson County. For parks closer than any of these, the Parks & Greenways Atlas covers Franklin's own.