Stump Grinding in Kennesaw Farms, Gallatin

The stump that came with the farm

This ground was a working thoroughbred operation for well over a century. The Franklin family bred here from 1868 and sent out two Kentucky Derby winners and a Belmont; the McMahans held it from 1913 to 2004, when three hundred acres were sold for development and the 1856 Baber mansion was renovated as the community's centrepiece the following year.

What that history left behind is a subdivision laid over the old paddock lines. Streets called Cavaletti Circle, Ambling Way, Paddock Park Circle and Halter Park Drive are not decoration; they follow the shape of a horse farm. And standing along a good many rear lot lines are the hedgerow trees that marked the fences, mostly osage orange and black locust, planted or self-sown a hundred years before anybody drew a plat.

So when a homeowner here calls about a stump, there are two completely different jobs hiding behind the same phone call. One is a Bradford pear the builder put in during 2008. The other is a hundred-year-old osage orange with fence wire grown through its collar, sitting on the line between two houses.

Wire in the wood

A tree that had barbed wire stapled to it in 1930 does not shed that wire. It grows around it. Fifty years later the strand is buried four inches inside the trunk and the staples are somewhere in the collar, and carbide teeth do not care that they were not expecting metal.

So before a hedgerow stump is quoted, we look for the evidence: the straight line of surviving trees running in the same direction, the remains of a post or a corner brace, scarring or a swollen band at the height a fence would have been, and a detector pass around the collar itself. None of it is conclusive, because wire ends up in odd places, but it is enough to price honestly.

The way we handle it is a stated contingency rather than a surprise. The quote says what the number covers and what happens if the wheel meets wire, and if it does, we stop, show you, and cut it out rather than dragging a strand round the wheel. Anyone who quotes an osage orange on a fence line as though it were a maple has not worked on old farm ground.

Whose stump is it when it sits on the line

A hedgerow tree between two lots is nearly always closer to the line than either owner realises, and the answer changes who pays and who has to agree. The county parcel viewer settles the boundary in a couple of minutes, and it is worth pulling up before either household commits to anything.

In practice the trunk position decides ownership and the roots do not respect it either way, so most of these end up as a shared job with one invoice split or two invoices from one visit. Either works. What does not work is one neighbor booking a machine to remove something that is half on the other side of a line.

Access usually comes from one side only, because these lines back onto each other. Whoever has the drivable route ends up hosting the machine, and that is worth a conversation over the fence before the date rather than a knock on the door at eight in the morning.

Osage orange against a builder maple

The feed-rate difference between these two categories is not subtle. Osage orange is among the hardest and densest woods on the continent; it blunts teeth, it burns hot, and it fights the wheel the whole way. Black locust is close behind, and it is rot-resistant enough that a dead one will stand upright for twenty years and still be solid at the base. A twenty-inch osage orange takes longer than a thirty-four inch silver maple and costs accordingly.

Black locust has one extra habit worth knowing: it suckers hard from severed roots, and a locust taken out without grinding the plate will send up shoots in a line along where the roots ran. That is the one species here where going wide is not optional.

Against all that, the honey locust, red maple and Bradford pear planted through the 2006 to 2012 phases are ordinary work at ordinary prices. Most Kennesaw jobs are those, and it is worth telling us which kind you have when you ring, because it changes the quote by a factor rather than a percentage.

Telling a hedgerow tree from a builder tree

• It stands in a straight line with others, usually on or near a rear lot boundary
• There is wire, a staple, or the stub of a wooden post somewhere at its base
• Osage orange: thorny twigs, deeply furrowed orange-brown bark, hedge apples on the ground in autumn
• Black locust: paired thorns at the nodes and deeply ridged grey bark
• The trunk is obviously older than the house it stands behind
• Eastern redcedar volunteers have filled in the gaps between the older trunks
• The line points at a corner or a gate position that no longer exists