Land clearing in Tuckers Crossroads, TN

Where Jennings Fork starts

Two prongs come together about a mile and a half below the crossroads, and Jennings Fork runs east from there into Round Lick Creek. The bottom along it is deep silt and slow to dry. It’s sycamore, hackberry and walnut ground. Privet gets in underneath, and briars come up behind it. It’ll mulch fine, but it’s better after a dry stretch, and that’s worth knowing before you pick a date.

Soil over limestone, and not much of it

Up out of the bottom, the ground at Tuckers Crossroads is Talbott silt loam over limestone that sits 20 to 40 inches down, and in places the rock reaches the top. Thin soil like that grows oak, hickory, elm and redcedar, and redcedar is the one that wins. Let a field sit two or three seasons and the seedlings are already through it. Cutting at the surface instead of digging matters on ground this shallow.

Grass, hay and a block of hardwood

What’s growing in the square miles around the school at the crossroads is mostly grass and hay, then hardwood, and almost no row crop. So the properties are cattle ground, hay ground, and a back block of timber that has stood a long time. That block is where cedar does the most damage. It takes the edges first and then works inward, and the useful part of the place gets smaller.

Down Trousdale Ferry Pike

The crossroads itself is State Route 141 (Trousdale Ferry Pike), meeting Big Springs and Linwood roads, eight miles east of the Lebanon square, with I-40 half a mile south. Nothing out here is incorporated, and the tracts still run large. A field gone to cedar is usually big enough to be worth opening in one pass. Linwood sits south, Saulsbury southeast, and the pattern holds across all of it. Pasture sits on the ridges, timber in the draws.