Land clearing in Monterey, TN

Thirteen hundred feet above Lebanon

Monterey sits at about 1,880 feet on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau. Lebanon sits at 528. That gap is most of what matters here. The rock underfoot is sandstone instead of limestone, so the soil runs sandier and more acidic. Oak, hickory and pine take the dry upland ground, and the coves hold heavier, wetter timber. Plateau ground doesn’t clear like rim ground.

Headwater hollows

Two rivers start within a few miles of town. The Falling Water rises in Welch Hollow just west of Monterey, and the Calfkiller begins at Stamps Hollow off the southwest side, where small streams drop off the plateau edge and gather. Headwater ground is steep and it stays damp. Briars and privet run the seeps and the lower banks, and they come back faster there than anywhere else on a place. Better taken on a dry stretch.

Timber you keep

Tracts up here are mostly woods worth keeping. Hunting ground, a cabin site, a few acres somebody wants to walk again. The work such ground calls for is thinning what grows under the trees, not the trees. Sandstone country puts up a thick tangle of sapling and briar beneath a good stand of oak, and once it closes in you lose the sight lines and the walking both. A mulching head pulls that layer out and leaves the timber you kept the place for. On a slope, what stays on the dirt is what holds it.

Up the western face

You come east on I-40 the whole way, and the road climbs. Cookeville still sits on the Highland Rim at about 1,100 feet; past it the interstate goes up the plateau’s western face, and Monterey is at the top, exits 300 and 301. There’s an older link west too. The Nashville and Eastern runs freight out here to the sand mine, and Monterey is the end of that line. Same railroad that comes through Lebanon.