Land clearing in Bell Buckle, TN

Flat ground with knobs behind it

Bell Buckle sits at 856 feet in northeastern Bedford County, and the ground west of town doesn’t stay down with it. Mingle Hill and Claxton Hill stand about two miles out. Epps Hills a mile past those, and Bare Knob, four miles northwest, tops 1,188 feet, better than three hundred feet above town. Hay ground low, slope in the middle, timber on the caps. One farm can hold all three.

Rock sitting close under the grass

On the steeper pieces the soil survey quits calling it soil and calls it a rock outcrop complex, Barfield and Ashwood over limestone. Barfield runs eight to twenty inches to bedrock where it has any depth at all. Cedar is the tree that doesn’t mind rooting on stone, so a field up there that stops getting cut goes to cedar first and briar underneath. Mulching suits ground like that. Nothing has to be dug out of rock that shallow.

Down in the creek bottom

Wartrace Creek heads a mile north of town and runs south past it toward Wartrace, and the bottom either side of it is mapped frequently flooded, Egam, Melvin, Agee. That ground holds water into spring, and wet bottom grows privet thicker than anything worth keeping. Bedford County land is cattle, hay and walking horses. A house, a barn, and more grass than one man keeps mowed. The back forty is usually the part that got away.

Getting there with a trailer

US 231 runs south out of Lebanon through Murfreesboro, and Highway 82 comes east off it into town, Webb Highway on the sign. The other way in is 269, up from Wartrace or down from Christiana. Either road puts you at the CSX main line, the reason there’s a town here at all. The Nashville and Chattanooga came through in 1852 and Bell Buckle grew up around the depot. Shaun runs the machine himself, so the man who looks at your ground runs it.