“They’re about ready to leave the nest,” said Julian Bibb ’77, watching the doves nesting in a corner of the porch of his law office in historic Franklin, Tennessee. This observation is apropos for the man who has helped birth 27 nonprofit organizations with missions ranging from social justice to environmental stewardship to public transportation.
A real estate and banking attorney, Bibb pours passion into his law practice with Stites & Harbison as well as into the Franklin community, where he settled in the mid-1970s while taking a year off from law school to teach high school English. In legal practice, Bibb’s uncanny ability to build consensus has established him as a go-to guy for banking and real estate clients. As a community leader, he has applied the same talent to help raise more than $40 million for Williamson County nonprofits.
Bibb credits his experience at Vanderbilt Law School as a life-shaping experience. “Vanderbilt instilled an ethic that service was part of the responsibly that came with a law degree,” he said. “I developed a number of consensus-building skills during my time at Vanderbilt—skills that became the basis for successful community building. It takes a different set of tools to find solutions and figure out how to make things happen, and I’ve always enjoyed those challenges.”
While establishing the nonprofit Franklin Tomorrow, Bibb encouraged developers and the historic community of Franklin to collaborate. He believed the groups could work together on healthy preservation of historic land that would benefit business, bring tourism and create a great quality of life and sense of place for Franklin residents. He was right. Since 2004, tourism in Franklin has increased 400 percent, and the city’s parks and green space have multiplied.
Bibb has worked tirelessly with the Land Trust for Tennessee, the Nature Conservancy, developers, private land owners and institutions to create conservation easements on more than 100,000 acres to preserve scenic land, historic sites and other cultural resources in Franklin and throughout Tennessee.
One of the most historic and significant land preservation projects Bibb has been involved with is Civil War battlefield preservation. In 2004, he joined others in creating Franklin’s Charge, a nonprofit established to raise $5 million to purchase and protect a 112-acre tract known as the Eastern Flank of the 1864 Battle of Franklin. Under the Franklin’s Charge banner, Bibb and others brought together nine different organizations to acquire the land.
“We approached six banks and asked them to loan us $2.5 million,” Bibb said. “We had no collateral and no guarantees. Then we asked each bank to give an additional $25,000 just to be included in the deal. Every one of those banks participated.” The city of Franklin added a dollar-for-dollar match, and the land was purchased. Since then, the group has purchased other key parcels of land and is in the process of creating a 20-acre public park to commemorate and educate visitors about the Battle of Franklin.
“I’ve never worked on one cause for 10 years, but the battlefield effort just kept going,” said Bibb, whose efforts led to the Civil War Trust awarding him the Shelby Foote Preservation Legacy Award in 2011. “I don’t think of myself as a Civil War guy. I see the battlefield as a community asset and part of the community heritage that needs to be understood and interpreted.”
Bibb says his passion for giving back to his community was instilled by his first employer, close friend and mentor, attorney Charles Warfield ’49 (BA’47) of Farris Warfield & Kanaday, the Nashville firm that merged with Stites & Harbison in 2001. “Charlie always says, ‘Don’t live to work, work to live, and part of that is serving your community,’” he said. In Franklin, Bibb is surrounded on all sides by evidence that his has been a life well-lived.