Thomas Farm Preserve Walking Trail Access in Watkinsville

Emily Givens spent thirty years wanting to walk out of her subdivision. Not far, not for exercise even, just out of Calls Creek Estates and down Simonton Bridge Road into downtown Watkinsville, the way you'd expect to be able to in a town with a population around 3,000. She couldn't. In a letter to the Oconee Enterprise this June, she put it plainly: "Who in their right mind would utilize that busy, narrow-shouldered thoroughfare for pedestrian pursuits?" So her family improvised, sprinting across the road, cutting behind First Baptist Church, following the railroad tracks toward Barnett Shoals Road when they wanted to get to town on foot.

That changed on June 19 of this year, when the city dedicated the Mulberry Street Covered Bridge and, with it, the sidewalk that finally reaches her subdivision's entrance. Givens called it what it was: "the last hurdle to a safe and leisurely stroll into town has been permanently removed." For her family, the walk is done.

For a lot of other people the walk isn't finished yet, and the ribbon-cutting coverage mostly skipped over that part.

What actually got built

The bridge itself is worth pausing on before we get to who it does and doesn't serve. It's a covered pedestrian bridge, styled after the Elder Mill Covered Bridge that still carries traffic across Rose Creek south of town, a structure on the National Register of Historic Places. The new Mulberry Street bridge runs about 160 feet, longer than the 99-foot original it borrows its look from. Mayor Brian Brodrick has said you could drive fourteen fire trucks across it at once without it giving an inch, which tells you this was built to last rather than to look nice for a season.

The person who built it has a personal stake in the design. Mark Thomas, who sits on the Oconee County Board of Commissioners and grew up on the farmland that's now Thomas Farm Preserve, is the great-grandson of the man who saved the original Elder Mill bridge by moving it to its current spot back in 1924. He partnered with Don Phillips of Industrial Mechanical Inc., a builder who by his own account had constructed almost everything except a bridge before this project.

There's a genuinely good historical detail here too. According to Brodrick, the route the path follows along Mulberry Street was the actual historic entrance into Watkinsville from Athens, a travel corridor used for more than 120 years before automobiles rerouted everyone through different streets. The new pedestrian bridge isn't inventing a connection. It's reopening one that predates most of the houses along it.

The mile that's finished

Here's the part residents can use starting now. The route runs from Rocket Field, behind the ballfields off 3rd Street, along a stretch of Mulberry Street the city paved for the project, across the new bridge, past the Watkinsville Cemetery, and out along a side path on Simonton Bridge Road to the entrance of Simonton Place subdivision. The city's own capital budget documents describe Phase 1 as roughly 1,880 linear feet of ADA-compliant sidewalk, a little over a third of a mile. That's the piece that's poured and open.

It cost real money to get there. Watkinsville landed a $1.53 million grant and a $2.225 million loan from the Georgia Transportation Infrastructure Bank in 2024 specifically to bridge the stream between Mulberry Street and the cemetery and extend the sidewalk toward Simonton Place, work the city has said it likely couldn't have financed on local funds alone.

Brodrick has framed the bigger goal in terms that go beyond concrete and grant paperwork. "We've got to create non-digital ways for people to connect," he told the crowd at the dedication. Whatever you think of that sentiment, the sidewalk in front of Simonton Place is a specific, measurable answer to it.

The mile that isn't

The city's own project page names three subdivisions this connector is meant to serve: Simonton Place, Morgan Manor, and Lee Lake. Only Simonton Place has a finished sidewalk right now. The same page describes extending the path further "over time using TSPLOST or SPLOST funds," which is planning language for a future budget cycle, not a completed project. If you live in Morgan Manor or Lee Lake, the bridge got built closer to you, but the sidewalk hasn't arrived yet.

There's also a second, entirely separate pathway in progress that the ribbon-cutting coverage barely mentioned. As of January 2026, the city and a private partner were working on a one-mile pedestrian path connecting Thomas Farm Preserve to Watkinsville First Baptist Church and on to Wire Park, meant to serve the Calls Creek, Taylor's Landing, Village Circle, and Camden Park neighborhoods. That project doesn't have a publicly announced finish date, and nothing in the city's more recent releases confirms it's complete. If your neighborhood is on that list rather than the Simonton Bridge Road corridor, the walk into town by way of Wire Park is still a construction zone, not a finished sidewalk.

None of this makes the bridge less real or less useful. It just means the tidy story, that Watkinsville is now fully walkable to its newest park, is true for some specific streets and not yet true for others. Worth knowing before you plan a route based on a press release photo.

What you're actually walking to

Thomas Farm Preserve opened in December 2024 as the largest undeveloped parcel inside city limits, a 100-acre former working farm the city bought for $4.55 million using a mix of SPLOST, ARPA, and property tax funds. The Thomas family held the land for 63 years before selling it to the city rather than to developers, and the park still carries their history in small ways. A house fire on the property once prompted local citizen Jim Thaxton and others to organize Oconee County's volunteer fire department, with the Thomas family's late father, Howard "Hot" Thomas, serving as its first chief. It was also the site of the area's first turkey farm outside the Thaxton family and the first peach farm inside city limits.

Once you're there, the preserve offers a mile of paved, wheelchair-accessible path around two ponds, more than two miles of crushed gravel trail through pasture and woods, and 2.3 miles of backcountry hiking and biking trail along the property boundary. There's a leashed-dog policy throughout and a designated off-leash dog park area. It's the kind of place that rewards a slow loop more than a fast one.

Why the timing matters right now

The bridge opened just in time for the busiest stretch of Watkinsville's calendar. This past Saturday, Oconee's Best BBQ Contest drew pitmasters and crowds to Rocket Field, the same spot where the new sidewalk begins, meaning some of the people at that event walked in on a path that didn't exist two months earlier. Next up is the Oconee Fall Festival on October 17, marking its 52nd year, still the largest single gathering downtown puts on annually.

There's also a new restaurant worth watching near Wire Park. Brett's Backyard, an indoor-outdoor concept from Brett and Leslie McCullough with lawn games and a private event room, broke ground in late 2024 and was aiming for a summer 2026 opening, with a second phase planned as an event barn seating close to 200. Whether it's open by the time you read this is worth confirming locally, but it's one more reason the walk toward Wire Park is going to matter more, once that second pathway actually gets finished.

The honest version

If you live along Mulberry Street, near the cemetery, or in Simonton Place, the walk into downtown Watkinsville is real, measured, and open today. If you're in Morgan Manor, Lee Lake, or the neighborhoods waiting on the Wire Park connector, the map looks finished from a press release and looks different from your front porch. That gap between the announced version and the on-the-ground version is worth knowing before you assume your street is part of it yet.

Watkinsville keeps investing in things that make it feel smaller and more connected even as the county around it grows, and that's the kind of local detail that matters whether you're a longtime resident or thinking ahead to your next move here. If you want a read on how a specific street or subdivision fits into where this town is headed, Linda Maples has spent decades tracking exactly these kinds of changes across Oconee County. Reach out anytime to talk through what a particular Watkinsville address is really connected to, on foot or otherwise.