Most repair shops tell you they are family owned and leave it there. Since ours is run by two people whose names are on very little, it seems worth saying who they actually are.
Dallas Beard and Thomas Powers ran shops in Franklin for years before Stones River existed. Different town, same trade, and a reputation built the slow way, which is one customer at a time telling somebody else.
The move out here was not a business plan. It was a complaint they kept hearing. Middle Tennessee has been moving east and south for a decade, and a steady number of their Franklin customers ended up in Rutherford County. Thomas describes what happened next simply enough. People would say, I wish you were closer.
You can hear that for a while and treat it as a compliment. Hear it enough and it turns into a suggestion.
What the two of them actually do is different. Thomas is the one you will speak to about your car, your bill and what happens next. Dallas is the one who will tell you what is wrong with your exhaust before you have finished parking. Thomas puts it this way: Dallas is the exhaust whisperer. Seriously. He can hear a rattle from across the parking lot.
That is not a line invented for a website. It is a thing about him that is mildly irritating to work near and extremely useful to have available.
The postal work shaped both of them. For years in Franklin they serviced postal delivery vehicles, which are unlike anything else that comes into a shop. They stop and start hundreds of times a day, they idle for a living, and they cannot be unavailable tomorrow, because a route does not care what the shop’s schedule looks like.
Dallas puts it plainly. Those trucks run hard. Rain, snow, summer heat, they are out there every single day. Thomas is the more revealing one on why they kept at it: there is something special about knowing you are part of keeping the mail moving.
That work teaches urgency without teaching shortcuts, which is a harder combination than it sounds.
What came to Murfreesboro with them is the part that matters to you. Diagnosing before replacing. Explaining in language that does not require a trade background. Telling somebody a repair can wait when it can wait. And Dallas’s line, which ended up being the whole point of the place: cars are what we fix, but people are why we do it.
Come and meet them. Stones River Auto and Exhaust, 1601 Flat Rock Road, Murfreesboro, Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
