Most gated communities sell you what's inside the gate. Centerville Conservation is a little different. The 975-acre plan set aside roughly 65 percent of the site as permanent conservation land, so what you get inside the gate is mostly what you get outside of it: rolling hills, hardwood stands, ponds, and a working land-management program overseen by the Leon County Environmental Department and the Apalachee Land Conservancy.
The part residents actually spend their Saturdays on, though, is the corridor. Centerville Road is a canopy road that connects an 1858 church, a country store that started smoking sausage in 1927, and a farm-to-table restaurant with 73 chickens in the back. All of it sits inside a fifteen-minute drive of the front gate, and the community's own pedway has quietly been extending the walkable footprint of the neighborhood into it.
The Pedway Between Bird Dog Point and Amber Lake
If you have been here a while, you have watched this project take shape. The HOA's community update flagged construction of new pedways designed to link Bird Dog Point to Amber Lake, giving residents a safe pedestrian route between two of the neighborhood's most-used common areas. Trail bridge maintenance, land-management equipment purchases, and coordination with an outside conservation assessment have all been part of the same push.
For a neighborhood whose lots typically sit on a couple of acres with wraparound porches, an internal pedestrian network is not a small thing. It changes what a Saturday morning looks like. Instead of driving to a park, you walk the pedway to the lake house, then decide whether the rest of the day happens by car or on foot.
One Road, Three Centuries of Anchor
Centerville Road is doing more work than any single amenity inside the gate. Three anchors along that corridor define the weekend:
| Anchor | Established | What it is | Rough drive from the gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old Pisgah United Methodist Church | Sanctuary built 1858; society organized 1830 | Oldest remaining Methodist church building in Leon County, on the National Register since 1974 | Under 5 minutes |
| Bradley's Country Store | 1927 | In-house smoked sausage, stone-milled grits milled on-property since the 1920s | About 10 minutes |
| Backwoods Crossing | Opened by brothers Jesse and Tyler Rice after their Sopchoppy bistro relocated to Tallahassee in 2012 | Farm-to-table restaurant on a 3.5-acre working farm with chickens, quail, rabbits, and bees | About 12 minutes via Centerville to Mahan |
The dates matter. You can stand at Bradley's front counter and know that the same family has been milling grits on that property in a form more or less continuous since your grandparents were children. You can sit in Old Pisgah's sanctuary and be sitting in the third church on that site, on hand-made pine pews, under original oil lamps still on the posts. And you can eat dinner four miles away at a restaurant whose menu changes weekly based on what the on-site farm brought in.
Dinner Inside a Working Farm
Backwoods Crossing is the anchor that most reliably shows out-of-town guests why this corner of Tallahassee earns their attention. The setup is unusual enough to be worth describing plainly:
- Roughly 3.5 acres of on-site gardens, orchards, chickens, quail, rabbits, and bees, with a greenhouse and shiitake mushroom logs
- 73 chickens producing an estimated 18,000 eggs a year for the kitchen and take-home sale
- Two menus: a standing selection of steak, seafood, and duck, plus a separate weekly "Garden Creations" sheet built around whatever came out of the beds that week
- Live music Thursday nights, 7 to 9 p.m., and weekday happy hour from 4 to 7 p.m.
- Address: 6725 Mahan Drive, hours running 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays, with Friday and Saturday closing at 10 p.m.
Chef Jesse Rice and his brother Tyler have described the model plainly: local farmers stop by, offer what they have, and if the kitchen can use it, they buy it. In Rice's own words on the specialty crops they favor, "It's different; it's new; it's exciting." Dragon carrots, Flamingo Pink Swiss chard, whatever is in season. If your reservation is for six or more, book ahead. Otherwise you can usually get seated inside five to seven minutes even on a busy night, based on how the room turns.
Bradley's Is the Errand That Isn't an Errand
Bradley's Country Store is twelve miles from the city and about ten minutes from the Centerville Conservation gate. It sells country-milled grits, cane syrup, and the sausage that draws travelers from across the Panhandle and South Georgia. If you have hosted anyone from out of state, you already know this: the drive down Centerville Road under the oak canopy is the part they remember as much as the sausage biscuit.
Two things worth knowing that make Bradley's more useful than nostalgic:
- The country store sits on Centerville Road itself, so you can fold it into a loop with the church, the pedway, and dinner without doubling back.
- It functions as a legitimate pantry stop, not a tourist detour. Sausage, grits, syrup, and preserves are practical to have in the house.
Bannerman Crossings and the North End of the Corridor
At the other end of the canopy corridor, Bannerman Crossings has been assembling itself into something closer to a district than a strip. The developer positions it as a mix of restaurants and cafés running from morning coffee through late dinner, local boutiques alongside national retailers, and Bannerman Commons residences integrated into the walkable footprint. Seasonal events, live music, and markets are baked into the schedule.
For Centerville Conservation residents, this changes the equation on a Friday night. You have a full-service dining destination at Backwoods Crossing on Mahan, and a walkable retail node with quicker weeknight options at Bannerman. Both are inside a fifteen-minute radius. That is unusually flexible for a neighborhood that reads, from the road, like pure conservation land.
Homecoming Sunday, Still
Old Pisgah United Methodist Church sits at the corner of Centerville Road and Pisgah Church Road, at the end of a canopy road that bears the church's name. The current 1858 sanctuary is the third structure on the site. It carries a broad front porch with three front doors, four elongated windows on each side, and hand-made pine pews. The sanctuary seats about 400.
Since 1924, an annual homecoming has been observed on the first Sunday in May, with state-wide educational, political, or religious leaders conducting the service.
That 1924 tradition is worth pausing on. Very few gathering rituals in Leon County have run continuously for a century. The cemetery holds Confederate soldiers of the Gramling family, and, in one open field marked only by a small plaque, an estimated thirty residents of the Centerville community who died in the 1841 yellow fever epidemic. If you have lived in Centerville Conservation for more than a season, you have almost certainly driven past Old Pisgah without stopping. The homecoming service, or a walk through the cemetery on a quiet afternoon, is worth the ten minutes.
A Saturday That Uses All of It
The reason to lay this out as a corridor rather than a list of amenities is that it composes. A representative summer Saturday, for a household already living inside the gate:
- Coffee on the porch. Walk the pedway from your side of the community toward Amber Lake and back before the heat sets in.
- Drive north on Centerville Road for a Bradley's stop. Sausage, grits, and a couple of jars of syrup for the pantry.
- Detour to Old Pisgah. Ten minutes in the sanctuary and the cemetery. If it is the first Sunday in May, this becomes the anchor of the day.
- Loop back through Bannerman Crossings for lunch or an afternoon errand.
- Reserve at Backwoods Crossing for dinner. Order off the Garden Creations sheet, which is where the kitchen is showing off. Thursday nights add the live-music window.
None of this requires leaving the corridor. That is the actual amenity of living in Centerville Conservation. The lots are large. The land is protected. And the road out front connects three of the most specific dining and heritage anchors in northeast Tallahassee, all inside a radius shorter than the average commute to Midtown.
If you have been thinking about what your Centerville Conservation home would be worth in the current market, or if you know someone considering the move into this corner of northeast Tallahassee, I would be glad to talk through it. Reach out to Jamie Yarbrough for a private conversation about your home's value and how the corridor around it is shaping demand this season.
