Land clearing in Cookeville, TN

Where the rim starts to fall away

Ground here runs about 1,089 feet, up on the Eastern Highland Rim, a good five hundred feet above Lebanon. The Falling Water River comes off the plateau edge near Monterey, runs southwest past Cookeville, then drops a hundred and thirty-six feet at Burgess Falls into a limestone gorge. Rim soil is silt loam over a hardpan about two feet down, strongly acid. Rain stalls on that pan. Oak, hickory and poplar do well on it, and what grows under them does better.

Lots cut out of the oak and hickory

The city keeps pushing outward. It annexed better than ten square miles between 2000 and 2009, with Tennessee Tech and its ten thousand-odd students in the middle. New tracts on the edge come out of standing hardwood. A piece like that usually wants a building site, a driveway line and a yard opened up, the big trees around the house left standing. A mulching head takes the understory and leaves them alone.

Small tracts going quiet

Farm ground is thinning out. Putnam County lost fifteen percent of its land in farms in five years, the average farm is down to 106 acres, and woodland is now the biggest single use of what’s left. Honeysuckle and privet take the bottoms, briars push out from the wood line, saplings close a lane. Getting it back means a line you can see, a spot for a stand, room for a truck. Privet is the one that costs you. Top it and it’s back next season.

Out at the top of the grade

Straight out I-40 from Lebanon, east, and the climb comes last. Cookeville sits well inside about fifty miles of Wilson County. The rim doesn’t stay flat once you’re on it. At Window Cliffs, Cane Creek loops under a Fort Payne caprock, beech and hemlock hold the coves, oak and hickory the tops. On slopes like that, over a pan that already holds water, a blade is the last thing you want.