Land clearing in Portland, TN

Level ground, hard layer under it

Portland sits at about 800 feet on the Highland Rim. Broad, level ground up here. Ridge tops, not hollows. What matters is underneath. Rim ridge soil is a silt cap over limestone, and much of it carries a fragipan, a tight layer two or three feet down that water won’t move through. High ground here can still be soft a week after rain, so tracks matter more than the elevation suggests.

Where the Red River starts

The Red River gets going a few miles due south of town, picks up Austin Branch just west of here, and runs northwest toward the Cumberland at Clarksville. On the east side, West Fork Drakes Creek goes the other way, north into Kentucky toward the Barren. Two watersheds a few miles apart, with the town on the divide. Bottoms on both sides stay wet and grow back harder than the fields above. Briars and honeysuckle get into a bottom first and hold it.

Fields cut for strawberries and tobacco

This is the strawberry capital of Tennessee, and dark tobacco ground long before that. Both crops wanted small level fields sized for hand work, and plenty are too small now for the equipment farming around them. Let one sit and blackberry, sumac and persimmon take it inside a few seasons, then sapling poplar, hickory and oak. Five years is enough to turn a mowed field into something you can’t walk across.

Last exit before Kentucky

I-65 crosses into Kentucky about half a mile past the SR 109 interchange, so the last two exits in Tennessee are both Portland’s. The railroad has run through the middle of town since 1859, and Fountain Head, the older settlement, sits a couple of miles south. Mitchellville is up near the Kentucky line, Oak Grove east. Ground around them changes hands to farm again or to build on, and either one starts with knowing what’s on it. Lebanon is about twenty-nine miles south, a straight run down 109 through Gallatin.