Matthew & Allie

Foothill Frolic Farm & Forest School did not begin with the idea of opening a school. In many ways, it has been growing quietly out of Matthew and Allie Neal's life together for more than twenty years.

Both Tennessee natives, Matthew and Allie met in Nashville in 2003 when Matthew randomly asked Allie to throw a Frisbee with him at Dragon Park. That simple invitation began a partnership that would eventually take them through organic farming, conservation land management, local food advocacy, building and woodworking, cooking, business ownership, hands-on education, and raising a family close to the land.

Matthew brings an extraordinary range of practical experience to Foothill Frolic. A builder, designer, problem-solver, business owner, and what Allie affectionately describes as an "all-around windmiller of trades," he can design, build, repair, or figure out just about anything—from water and electrical systems to furniture and structures. At the school, Matthew helps oversee administration, facilities, building projects, and the endless practical problem-solving involved in creating a learning environment from the ground up.

Allie grew up right here on the historic Gammon-Mills Farm, roaming the same fields, woods, and creeks that will now become part of the students' learning environment. A Division I Cross Country and Track athlete at Belmont University, she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Biology and Chemistry and was named Belmont's Female Presidential Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

Soon after college, Allie became deeply interested in the connections among organic farming, nature, health, education, and real food. For more than twenty years, she has grown, prepared, taught about, and advocated for local, organic, seasonal food. Today she brings that experience to the educational, agricultural, culinary, and philosophical development of Foothill Frolic.

Together, Matthew and Allie previously established Arugula's Star of Neal Family Farms, a certified organic vegetable and CSA farm that also offered a hands-on agricultural internship program.

In 2019, they returned with their son, Eastenn Dutch, to Allie's generational family farm in Northeast Tennessee and established Foothill Frolic Farm on Gammon Creek. Today, three generations of their family live and work on this land, continuing its agricultural story through a regenerative, rotationally grazed custom beef operation.

Their family has also spent years homeschooling through farm-based, project-based, nature-based, and Waldorf-inspired learning. And somewhere along the way, an idea that had been quietly following Matthew and Allie for years began to take shape:

What if children could learn this way, too?

What if farming, nature, academics, craftsmanship, food, imagination, responsibility, business, and meaningful work did not have to be separate subjects?

Foothill Frolic Farm & Forest School is the natural convergence of those questions and of the life Matthew and Allie have been building together.

Their hope is to create something simple, beautiful, useful, and deeply rooted—a place where children can roam, observe, wonder, make, build, grow, work, get dirty, ask questions, solve problems, care for living things, and discover that learning is not something that only happens while sitting at a desk.

For Allie, there is something especially full-circle about it.

She grew up on this farm.

She left, learned, explored, ran, farmed, cooked, built, taught—and eventually found her way back home.

Now her own son is growing up on the same land.

And Foothill Frolic Farm & Forest School is, in many ways, simply the next chapter of that story.