Stump Grinding in Chapmansboro, TN
Chapmansboro is river-bottom farm country fifteen minutes up Highway 12 past Cheap Hill, where Sycamore Creek comes down to the Cumberland. Big old trees, long drives, no town utilities, and hedgerows full of wire.
Yes to Chapmansboro and Cheap Hill, a quarter of an hour north on Highway 12 with a gravel drive usually making up the last of it. Send photographs any weekday for a firm figure that day, and expect a grinding date inside the following week.
Hedgerow Wood Eats Teeth
Farms up here were fenced with woven wire stapled to whatever was standing, and sixty years later the tree has grown around the fence. Osage orange, honey locust, black locust and cedar are the usual suspects in a Chapmansboro hedgerow, and every one of them is likely to have wire, staples or a whole stretch of barb buried in the first few inches of wood.
Osage orange on its own is the hardest thing we cut in this county. Add embedded steel and you have a stump that can end a set of teeth in one afternoon. So hedgerow stumps get swept with a detector before the wheel goes near them, they get quoted differently from a yard tree of the same diameter, and you are told that at the estimate rather than by a change order afterwards.
If you know a fence once ran on that line, say so. It is more useful to us than the diameter is.
The Homeplace Sycamore and the Yard Maple
The other standard job here is the old farmhouse yard: a pair of sycamores or a silver maple planted for shade over a porch a century ago, now forty-eight to sixty inches through, with a root flare that spreads a good deal wider than the trunk. Grinding one of those is not a bigger version of a driveway stump. The circle the machine has to work is several feet larger than people picture, and the spoil comes off in a volume that surprises even farm owners.
Which is where rural has an advantage. In town, that pile has to go on a truck. Out here it can be windrowed into a gap in a fencerow, spread thin along a field edge or dropped where a barn lot needs building up, provided we stay clear of the mapped bottom ground along the creek and the river.
That one decision — spread it or haul it — is often a couple of hundred dollars on a stump this size, and it belongs to you, not to us.
No Town Utilities Means Every Hazard Is Private
There is no city water and no sewer out here. What runs under a Chapmansboro yard is your own equipment: a supply line from the well to the house, a buried run out to a stock tank, a propane line from the tank at the gable end, a lateral field somewhere behind the house.
Tennessee 811 will get the co-op and the telecom marked in three working days, and we file that ticket when you book rather than the morning we arrive. What 811 will not do is mark anything that belongs to you. The propane run and the stock-tank line are the two that catch people here, because both were trenched by hand years ago and neither is on a plan anywhere.
So the walk-round is the real safety step. Come out with us and put a flag or a stake wherever you think something is buried. Roughly right is plenty, and it has saved more than one owner a plumber on a Saturday.
Chapmansboro and Cheap Hill work
- Hedgerow osage orange, locust and cedar with woven wire grown into the base, swept before grinding
- Homeplace sycamore and silver maple at forty-eight to sixty inches, with flares wider than the trunk
- Spoil windrowed into a fencerow gap or spread on a field edge instead of trucked away
- Long gravel drives where the truck parks short and the machine walks the last stretch
- Propane runs and stock-tank water lines that 811 does not mark and no plan records
- Cumberland and Sycamore Creek bottom ground where a spoil mound counts as fill
- Overhead co-op service drops through the canopy, needing a scheduled disconnect before a takedown
Sources
- CEMC Vegetation ManagementThe member, not the contractor, arranges the service-line drop, and debris from a storm-felled tree is not the co-op's to remove
Services here
Questions Chapmansboro homeowners ask us
Is there a minimum charge for coming this far out?
There is a minimum service call, the same one that applies in town, and on a single small stump fifteen minutes north it is usually what you pay. Nobody enjoys paying a minimum for a twelve-inch cedar, so if you have a second stump anywhere on the place, or a neighbour with one, that is the moment to mention it.
Who do I call about the power line to the house before a tree comes down?
Cumberland Electric Membership Corporation, on 800-987-2362, and the call is to have them drop the service line rather than to ask permission. They keep a district office in Ashland City, they hold a twenty-foot right-of-way either side of their lines, and they tell members plainly not to prune inside it themselves. Book that appointment the same day you book the tree work.
A storm dropped a tree across the field. Will the co-op take it away?
No. The co-op clears its own trimming debris and will cut what it must to restore the line, but a storm-fallen tree stays the member's property, and so does everything left on the ground once the power is back on. That surprises a lot of people the week after an ice storm, and it is why the stump call usually comes a month later than the tree did.
Can we just leave the grindings where they fall?
On most of a Chapmansboro farm, yes, and it is the cheapest answer. The exception is the mapped bottom along the Cumberland and Sycamore Creek, where a mound of spoil can be read as fill in a flood hazard area and needs a permit before it stays. Away from that ground, spread it thin and it is gone into the soil in two or three seasons.