Land clearing in Hendersonville, TN

Water came up to meet the land

Hendersonville sits at about 480 feet on the Nashville Basin floor, and Old Hickory Lake is why the ground reads the way it does. The dam closed in June 1954, and the back of a farm became shoreline in a season. Nothing here was laid out for a lake, so road to water is a short, steep fall. The bottom third of it never gets mowed, hardwood overhead, privet and honeysuckle filling in underneath.

Holding the bank once you open it up

Steep ground above water is the wrong place for a burn pile and the wrong place for bare dirt. Mulch stays flat where it falls, and that layer is what carries a bank through the first hard rain. Pull the understory, leave the big hardwoods standing, and an owner gets the view and a slope they can walk instead of a scraped hillside sitting over the lake.

Up Drakes Creek toward Shackle Island

Drakes Creek comes down through the north end of town. Four miles up, it once split into two channels around a piece of ground, and that is the island in Shackle Island’s name. The eastern branch has mostly filled in, though you can still pick out where it ran. Follow SR 258 north and the subdivisions thin into open ground and old fencerows. Cedar’s the tell out there. It’s a pioneer tree on limestone and worn pasture, so where it’s coming up thick, a field has been sitting a while.

Small tracts and a short trip over

More than sixty thousand people live on about thirty-two square miles of land here, so most of it is a few acres behind a house, not a farm. Rock Castle, southeast of town on the water, is down to eighteen acres from a grant that once ran to thousands. Hendersonville is about twenty miles west-northwest of Lebanon, and the same lake sits against Wilson County on its far end. Shaun walks a place before he puts a number on it.