Land clearing in Nolensville, TN

Rich ground grows brush too

William Nolen broke a wagon wheel here in 1797 and stayed for the soil. Nolensville sits at about 605 feet, mostly flat with a few hills in it. Dirt that good doesn’t sit idle. A hayfield that misses a couple of seasons goes to broomsedge, then blackberry, then cedar and privet, and by the third year you can’t walk it. Cedar won’t sprout back once it’s cut clean, but top it and the limbs left under the cut just keep going, so it has to be taken low.

Mill Creek starts near town

The town was built along Mill Creek, and this is the top end of it. From here the creek runs about twenty-eight miles through Williamson and Davidson counties into the Cumberland, two miles above downtown Nashville. Up at the head it isn’t much. Branches and wet-weather draws sit in the bottoms behind the fields. That low ground stays soft well into spring, and it carries privet and bush honeysuckle heavier than the higher fields do. Ground like that dictates the week you go in, not whether you can.

Small tracts, not wholesale clearing

Nolensville went from 5,861 people in 2010 to 13,829 in 2020, and the acreage around a town growing like that gets looked at again. On a five- or ten-acre tract the job is rarely to take everything off. It’s a house site, a driveway line, a yard, and the fencerow between one place and the next. Mulching suits that, because there’s no burn pile and no line of trucks working out of a street where people already live.

Getting there from Lebanon

About twenty-five miles southwest, over in Williamson County. The town covers about ten and a half square miles, so most of what’s worth clearing sits outside that line, in the fields, the fencerows and the creek bottoms. Shaun walks the tract before anything is priced, and what he quotes is by the acre and in writing.