Land clearing in Bethpage, TN

Where the Rim breaks down

Bethpage sits at about 540 feet, down on the basin floor, and ridges inside two miles east and west stand past 800 feet. Westmoreland, six and a half miles northeast, is nearly 400 feet higher, up on the Highland Rim proper. The Rim edge is four miles north, and the hills closer in are knobs it left behind. So one farm can hold three kinds of ground. Thin rocky soil on the hillsides, deeper silt on the flats, silt again in the bottoms. Each comes back at its own speed.

Cedar takes the rock first

The hillside soils are the thin ones. On the rockiest, solid limestone starts inside two feet and bare rock takes better than a third of the surface. Grass gives up on ground like that. Eastern redcedar doesn’t. Let a rocky corner sit out of grazing a couple of seasons and the cedar has it. Cedar on rock is work for a mulching head, not a bucket. The head cuts above the stone instead of dragging through it. A bush hog wouldn’t hold that slope anyway.

Hardwood and grass, not row crop

Deciduous timber covers better than half the land around Bethpage, grass and pasture better than a third. Corn and beans together don’t make three percent. It’s cattle, hay and hardwood, and the trouble that comes with it is predictable. Fence line giving up to blackberry and cedar. A lane to the back field closed over. Privet thickening in the Dry Fork and Otter Fork bottoms, where the ground stays soft long after the fields dry.

Straight north out of Lebanon

US 231 leaves Lebanon, crosses the Cumberland at Hunter’s Point and ties into 31E at Bransford, two and a half miles northeast of town. Call it twenty-four miles and a little over half an hour, near enough due north. Bledsoe Creek runs past the east side of town, headed south for Old Hickory Lake. On ground pitched that way, chips left lying hold the dirt where it belongs.