Land clearing in Red Boiling Springs, TN

A valley cut by Salt Lick Creek

The town floor sits at about 771 feet, Salt Lick Creek running the length of it. Hollows come in from every side. Whitley to the north, McClure west, Witcher off to the east. Go south toward Willette and the ground stands better than two hundred feet higher. This is Highland Rim country. The flat is a ribbon along the water and everything else leans.

Chert in the sidehill soil

On the soil map the slopes off the creek are Hawthorne. That’s gravelly silt loam on grades of twenty to sixty percent, twenty to forty inches of dirt over siltstone and cherty limestone. Below the topsoil it runs better than a third rock. Ground like that grows chestnut and white oak, hickory, hackberry and red cedar. It sheds water hard, and a blade scrapes it to bedrock. East of town the grade eases and the map turns to Sugargrove.

Bottom ground that floods and drains

Down on the creek the dirt changes to Skidmore, a deep gravelly loam that takes water now and then. A flood came through the middle of town in 1969. Gravel underneath means it firms up quick, so it isn’t the soft bottom people expect. Privet, honeysuckle and cane come back on those banks hard. Chips left lying on ground like that beat a pile the next rise can float off.

Northeast out of Lebanon

Run it up 231 out of Lebanon, over to 25, north on 10 to Lafayette, then east on 52, the last miles dropping off the Rim into the creek valley. Water here drains north into Kentucky, into the Barren, and the black shale under the valley is what mineralized the springs the town was named for. What’s up here is hay and cattle pasture, old tobacco patches nobody has set in years, and hardwood held for hunting. Fencerows, lanes, a field edge pushed back off the timber. That’s what ground like this asks for.