Land clearing in Walter Hill, TN

Where 231 takes the East Fork

Walter Hill sits at the crossroads of Lebanon Road and Jefferson Pike, half a mile up from the 231 bridge over the East Fork of the Stones River. Elevation there is 545 feet. Two kinds of ground meet at that crossing. The bottom is deep river soil that grows whatever you let it. Climb out of the floodplain and you’re on Ridley and Lebanon limestone, with a few inches of dirt over it in places.

Bottom land that stays soft

River ground here holds moisture into late spring. Sycamore and box elder take the bank, hackberry stands behind them, and privet fills every gap underneath until you can’t see thirty feet through it. On a bank like that, the last thing you want is a machine hauling loads in and out over wet dirt. Leaving the cut where it falls keeps the ground covered instead of bare and sloping toward the water.

Cedar takes the flats

Up off the floodplain it flips. Red cedar is the tree that thrives on thin dirt over rock, and a field up there that quits getting mowed goes to cedar and briars quicker than the same field would on deeper ground. Sunnybell Cedar Glade, twelve miles north of Murfreesboro on the Walterhill quadrangle, is that ground at its extreme. Bare rock, cedar, nothing between. Cedar cuts clean with a mulching head, but it comes back, so a cleared flat is worth mowing after.

Hay crop and back lots

The floodplain is still farmed on purpose. The 34-acre Walterhill Floodplain natural area gets lightly plowed after May 15th and put in summer hay, all to keep one of the world’s largest stands of Stones River bladderpod going. That tells you what this dirt is worth. The rest is county lots off 231 with a wooded back third nobody has walked in years. It’s under twenty miles down 231 from Lebanon, past the old dam and the brick powerhouse that still stands in the park there.