Land clearing in Lebanon, TN

The limestone that took the town’s name

Geologists named a rock formation after this place. The Lebanon Limestone is thin-bedded gray stone, 80 to 100 feet thick, named for outcrops here in Wilson County. It sits close enough to the surface to decide what grows. On the glade flats there are a few inches of soil over flat rock. Red cedar lives on that. Briars fill whatever gap the cedar leaves. A field that stops getting mowed doesn’t stay a field long.

Two kinds of ground, one property

Lebanon sits at 528 feet in the Central Basin. Sinking Creek runs through town past the square, then joins Bartons Creek on the way to the Cumberland at Old Hickory. Creek bottom is a different job than glade flat. Bottomland holds water into spring, grows privet thick, and wants a dry week before a machine goes in. A quarter mile upslope the rock is at the surface and it’ll carry weight in February. Plenty of properties have both.

What the state forest shows

Ten miles south on US 231, Cedars of Lebanon sits on eroded, cut over, grazed out farmland the federal government bought up in 1935 and replanted in red cedar. The barrens there need mechanical thinning and fire now to stay open. Those glades hold about 350 plant species, 29 that grow nowhere but glades like these. Opening that ground is one job. Keeping a mower on it after is another.

Home ground

Shaun works out of Lebanon, so this is the home county, not the far edge of the map. Property here runs from a half acre behind the square, laid out in 1802 over the Town Spring, out to fencerows along Sparta Pike and Hartsville Pike, where town keeps pushing into hay ground. A mulcher suits that kind of ground, since what comes down stays put as cover. Cedar takes back whatever quits being farmed.