Land clearing in Shelbyville, TN

Limestone under the pasture

Shelbyville sits at about 759 feet in the Central Basin, on limestone. That rock weathers into the soil that grows the grass horses do well on, which is why Bedford County is horse country. The Walking Horse Celebration finishes here the Saturday night before Labor Day. Pasture is the product, so anything green that isn’t grass is competition. Soil depth shifts across one field too, deep in the low ground, thin over rock on the rises. Cedar finds the thin ground first.

Cedar and the Pencil City

A pencil plant opened here in 1916 and took its wood off local cedar fence posts and rails, because red cedar is what this ground grows. Let a field sit out of production two or three seasons and cedar comes up through it. It comes out of the fencerow first, then across the open. Cedar won’t sprout back off a cut stump the way a hardwood will, so a stem mulched flat is done. What returns comes from seed already in the dirt.

Down in the Duck bottoms

The Duck River wraps the south and east sides of town. Flat Creek comes in from the south, Sugar Creek joins west of town, and Hurricane Creek crosses Midland Road to the north. Bottom ground along all of it stays soft well past the last frost, and privet and honeysuckle take hold down there instead of cedar. Land like that works best in a dry spell, or after a hard freeze.

South down 231

US 231 runs south out of Wilson County, through Murfreesboro, and on into Bedford. It is the same basin limestone nearly the whole way, so the ground down there is close kin to home ground. Asks on land like this tend to be plain. Pasture back out to the fence. A hayfield that quit being one. A building site that grew up while it waited. Middle Tennessee Land Clearing is family-owned, licensed and insured, Shaun Belcher and his son, at it since 2024.