Land clearing in Hillsboro, TN

At the foot of the plateau

US 41 crosses the Winchester Highway at 1,053 feet, and three miles east the Cumberland Plateau starts to go up. Big Butte is the western nose of it, a hair under 2,000 feet, better than nine hundred feet above the crossroads. Slope that steep stays in hardwood. It’s the flat Highland Rim ground below it, between Manchester and the mountain, that’s worth opening up.

Bradley Creek and the ground beside it

Bradley Creek runs past town and off southwest toward the Elk River. Some of the rises above it carry deep red clay, five feet and better before anything hard. Firm footing, and the reason anything cut here comes back in a hurry. The bottoms are another matter, wet ground that floods now and again, holding willow and sweetgum and water oak. That ground wants a dry stretch or a hard freeze before anybody drives on it.

Barrens that close in

Three or four miles northwest, out toward Manchester, May Prairie protects 492 acres, open grassland pushing into oak forest where the barrens begin, and the state burns it on purpose to keep woody growth from swallowing it. The same rain falls on every fencerow out toward Prairie Plains. Blackberry and sapling oak walk out from under a treeline into hay ground a few feet a year, and a bush hog only trims the front of that. It’s ground for a mulching head.

Row crop, hay and the run down

Farms in Coffee County average about 196 acres, and there are fewer of them than five years back. Soybeans, corn and hay hold the flat ground, and better than 25,000 head of cattle hold the rest. So what needs opening out here is field corners, grown-up fencerows, a lane back to the timber, creek edge nobody can mow. The run down is I-24 southeast, off the interstate below Manchester, then out US 41 with the plateau rim standing up bigger the whole way.