Land clearing in Hartsville, TN

Low ground under the hills

Trousdale is the smallest county in Tennessee, 114 square miles of land, and Hartsville is the only town in it. The town sits at 472 feet. Hills come down out of Macon County to the north. The Cumberland runs the south line, the one Trousdale shares with Wilson County, and Old Hickory still has the river pooled that far up. Bottoms below town stay soft long after a rain. That’s tracked-machine ground, not wheeled.

Goose Creek and the small ones

The West Fork of Goose Creek comes down out of those northern hills, through the middle of town, and on into the lake. Dixon Creek, Rocky Creek, Lick Creek and Skillet Creek run their own lines to the same water. Brush travels those corridors. Privet and honeysuckle seed upstream and turn up below, and a bush hog can’t hold a creek bench that’s cut steep on both sides. A mulching head takes a bank standing up.

Old tobacco ground

Hartsville ran a thriving loose-leaf tobacco market once, with auction warehouses, two factories, and a high school Tobacco Bowl named for the crop. Corn, oats and wheat went with it. A lot of those patches sat on creek benches and in hillside pockets, and a lot of them are out of production now. Ground like that goes to blackberry and sumac first. Cedar follows onto the thin spots, and cedar is the one to get right, because it won’t come back off the stump the way briars will.

Seventeen miles up the pike

Northeast out of Lebanon on Hartsville Pike, which is 141, across the Cumberland and into Trousdale. Hay and cattle ground asks for edges more than acreage, the fencerow pushed back to the fence, the pasture corner the cedars took, a way down to the creek a truck can use. Part of Old Hickory Wildlife Management Area lies in this county too, and land that backs up to it grows the same way. Thick, and thicker every year it’s left.