Stump Grinding on McMurry Boulevard, Hartsville
McMurry is three minutes out from the Square and we are on it most weeks, so yes, both ends are covered - the high school side west and the TCAT side east. A photo texted in gets a firm figure back before the day closes out.
The stump is at the end of six hundred feet of gravel
Most of the houses on this corridor sit a long way back. A 1990s manufactured home on five wooded acres can be five to seven hundred feet off McMurry behind its own gravel track, and the stump people call about is almost always where that track meets something - the turnaround, the mailbox, the culvert at the road.
That is what turns a simple grind awkward. The wood might be a twenty-four inch hackberry and forty-five minutes of work, but getting to it means a single-lane drive with a soft shoulder, no room to swing a trailer, and a low spot that stays wet a week after rain.
The other regular call is frontage. This is State Route 25 with a commercial strip along it, and a stump left in a parking island or against a sign base becomes somebody's liability the first time a customer catches a foot on it.
Fifteen feet either side of that line belongs to the co-op
Tri-County Electric's distribution circuit runs the length of McMurry, and their vegetation policy is specific about the numbers: fifteen feet of clearance each side of distribution, fifty feet on transmission, ten feet around open secondary and six around insulated. Nothing woody is allowed to stand inside twenty feet of a pole. Around a pad-mount transformer it is six feet all round with nothing at all inside ten feet of the cabinet front. Vegetation causes eight to ten percent of their outages, which is why the policy reads like that.
Grinding happens at grade, so the wire overhead is rarely the obstacle. What is under the stump matters more. Underground secondary, meter bases and service conduit all live in the same strip of yard, and the co-op will locate its own buried lines free on a call to 800-369-2111.
Worth knowing if you plan to replant after a grind: dogwood is the only tree Tri-County approves inside a right-of-way. Anything else you set there eventually comes back out.
Gravel, culverts and nowhere to turn around
The grinder rides on a trailer, and the trailer is the limiting factor rather than the machine. Before we start down a long private drive there are three things we want to know: how wide the culvert pipe is where the drive meets the road, whether any spot along it is wide enough to swing a truck and trailer, and how the low ground behaves two days after rain.
Where there is no turnaround at all, we drop the machine at the head of the drive and walk it in. That adds time, which is better priced at the quote than discovered on the day. On the worst of them we back in off McMurry, and that means picking a window when traffic past the high school on 262 is not moving.
Three campuses on one boulevard
Trousdale County High School sits at 262 McMurry Boulevard West, Jim Satterfield Middle is round on Damascus Avenue, and the Tennessee College of Applied Technology is at 716 on the east end. Between them they put almost every vehicle in the county onto this road twice a day.
For a job on the frontage that is a scheduling matter rather than an obstacle. We keep trailers off the boulevard entirely during the arrival and dismissal periods and work the middle of the day, and on the Damascus and Andrews Avenue side we stage in a driveway rather than on the street. It sounds fussy. It is the difference between a grind that nobody notices and one that backs traffic up past the school gate.
Cedar, black locust and hackberry are what you have
Eastern red cedar dominates the old fencerows along here and it is a slow, stringy grind that leaves ropey fiber rather than clean chip. Black locust is difficult for a different reason: it is among the densest wood in the county, it carries thorns low on the trunk, and it stays sound underground for decades after the top has died.
Hackberry and silver maple are the quick ones, soft and fast, but both throw wide shallow plates that surface across a gravel drive and get clipped by every mower blade and truck tire that passes. The Bradford pears in the commercial landscaping root shallow enough that the stump will sometimes lift a whole panel of asphalt on the way out.
What we need to know before starting down a private drive off McMurry
- Culvert width at the road, and whether the pipe ends are breaking up
- Any point along the drive wide enough to turn a truck and trailer
- How the low ground holds water two days after rain
- Whether the stump sits inside fifteen feet of the co-op's distribution line
- Well lines, service conduit or an electric fence run crossing the route
- Gate widths, including the one you never open
- School traffic times if the drive comes out near the high school
Sources
- Tri-County EMC right-of-way clearance rulesRight-of-way clearance of fifteen feet either side of distribution circuits, a twenty-foot woody-stem exclusion around poles, and dogwood as the only approved planting
- Tri-County EMC underground locatingThe co-op will mark its own underground at no charge before excavation
What we do in McMurry Boulevard
What folks along McMurry ask
Can you grind a stump right at the edge of Highway 25?
Usually, with two checks first. One is who owns the ground it stands on, because the state right-of-way along a route like this reaches further back from the pavement than people assume. The other is the overhead line, since the co-op keeps fifteen feet either side of its distribution wire. Neither one stops the job. Both change how we set the machine and where the discharge points.
Do I need to call anybody before you dig near the power pole?
Tennessee 811 takes three working days and covers the participating utilities. Tri-County will separately locate its own buried lines at no charge. Neither service marks private runs, and out here those are the ones that get hit - the line to the well pump, the conduit under the gate, the gas run out to the shop. If you put it in, you are the map.
Will you bring the machine down a gravel drive that soft?
We will walk it down. The truck and trailer stay where the ground is firm and the grinder travels the rest on its own tracks, which spread weight far better than a loaded trailer does. It costs a little time and no damage. What we will not do is drag a trailer through a wet low spot and leave you two ruts to fill.
The mower keeps hitting a root where my drive turns. Is that a small job?
Often yes, and it is one of the cheaper things we do. A surface root crossing a gravel turn is usually a hackberry or silver maple lateral that can be cut and ground down in under an hour without touching the parent tree, provided the tree is one you want to keep. Send a photo along the length of the root, not just the high point.