Stump Grinding in Downtown Hartsville, Around the Square

The stump is behind the building and the alley is the only way to it

Broadway and Front Street were built wall to wall with no side yards, so whatever grew up behind a storefront is boxed in by brick on two sides and somebody else's back wall on the third. A stump can sit twenty feet from the sidewalk and still take an hour to reach.

What gets called in down here is rarely about mowing. It is a hackberry collar lifting the back stoop the delivery driver uses, a maple pressing against masonry that was laid in the 1900s and never reinforced, or a soft dish in the alley gravel where a stump rotted out and now holds a week of rain.

Then the building changes hands and the thing you walked past for years turns into a line on an appraiser's list, or a contractor's reason he cannot pour the new pad.

Four fires, and a wall older than the mortar in it

The Hartsville Historic District carries a period of significance from 1860 to 1940, and only a handful of antebellum buildings survive, because the Square burned in 1877, 1900, 1902 and 1904. What went back up each time was one- and two-part commercial brick, party wall to party wall, on stone and shallow rubble footings.

That history writes the rule for a grinder. Those footings were never meant to take a machine parked against them, and a cutting wheel three feet from rubble stone puts side load exactly where the mortar is weakest. We work the stump from the open side, take the last few inches of wood next to the wall with a bar and shovel, and stop where roots turn under the footing instead of chasing them.

The district runs roughly Main on the north, Greentop south, River east and Church west - twenty-nine contributing buildings and two structures. If your address falls inside that box, assume the wall behind you deserves the caution.

Silver maple, cedar, and a row of Bradford pears

Silver maple shades most of the side streets off Church and River, and it grinds fast because the wood is soft and wet. Its plate is the problem: broad, shallow, and inclined to run out under a brick walk, so the work spreads sideways much further than the trunk suggests.

Eastern red cedar is the opposite animal. It ropes up under the wheel instead of chipping clean, and it barely decays, so a cedar sawn flush in the eighties is still solid a foot down. Hackberry lands between them - soft, fibrous, and usually carrying surface roots through thin soil.

The Bradford pears in the later streetscape planting bring their own small headache. They split at the crotch rather than dying outright, which leaves a low multi-stem stump with three or four separate collars to take out instead of one.

Backfilling on ground that is mostly rubble

Four fires left more than a streetscape behind. The ground behind these buildings is made ground - brick bat, mortar, burnt timber and cinder pushed flat and gravelled over, layer on layer, since the 1870s. It is why a shovel behind Front Street rings instead of cutting.

That changes the finish. Grindings mixed into rubble fill do not settle the way they do in soil; they wash down into the voids and the surface drops unevenly. Behind a storefront we generally take the spoil away, put clean fill in the hole and leave the top an inch high for it to find its own level. Where the space is gravel rather than grass, we finish with crusher run instead, because chip under vehicle traffic turns to slurry inside two wet weeks.

Where the truck sits while we work

Staging is half the planning on the Square. Title 16 of the municipal code covers streets and sidewalks, so anything that puts a trailer or a chip pile in the public way is a question for the county office at 328 Broadway beforehand rather than afterwards. We would rather ask.

The practical limits are simpler than the code. The fire department is at 210 Broadway and that curb stays clear no matter what. The Depot and the courthouse block pull parking through the day, and the library over on White Oak Street has its own comings and goings. Early morning is the easy window, and on the tightest addresses we leave the truck a block off and walk the machine down the alley.

What we check before a machine goes down a Broadway alley

• The narrowest pinch on the route, measured rather than eyeballed
• Whether the rear wall is original party wall or later infill
• Gas meters, cleanouts and downspouts sharing the same alley
• Where the spoil goes, since there is no grass back there to spread it on
• Whether any part of the job has to occupy the street or the walk
• Old fuel fills and cistern lids hiding under the gravel