Overgrown Lot in Lumberton, TX

People move up Highway 69 from Beaumont and Port Arthur to Lumberton for the trees, so an overgrown lot here is rarely cleared to bare ground. The loblolly and slash pine and the scattered hardwoods are why the lot was bought, and they are also the easiest thing to lose. A tracked machine compacting the soil inside the drip line, or a bucket cutting the surface roots, kills a pine a year or two later when nobody connects it to the clearing. So the keepers get marked before anything runs, and the machine routes and the debris piles are planned around their root zones. The understory of yaupon, wax myrtle and greenbrier comes out from between them. On a lot where the canopy is staying and the ground is only meant to be walkable, a mulcher does that faster and leaves a mat that holds the sand. Where a slab or a drive is going, the excavator takes the stumps out with the root plate inside that footprint only, and stumps outside the footprint get ground, which costs less.

On wooded acreage the front corners are usually easy. They are near the county road, the culvert and the neighbor's mailbox, and a detector finds them. The back corners are in the deepest part of the growth, and on tracts that were split from a larger piece of family timber the old fence often follows where a cow wanted to walk rather than where the plat says the line runs. Bearings and distances come off the plat and the deed, and rather than clear toward a guess we mow a single strip along that bearing with the excavator and run a detector down it, leaving the pines on both sides untouched. Lost pins, a fence off the plat line, or a neighbor with an opinion all go to your surveyor, and the boundary sits untouched while the rest of the lot proceeds. Everything else on the lot can proceed. Clearing a neighbor's pine because a wire fence said so is the mistake that cannot be undone on a lot like this.

Lumberton is where the coastal clay starts giving way to the sandier soils of the Big Thicket, and the ground has fall in it that Jefferson County lots do not. That is good news for working days, because sandy soil drains and carries a machine when the clay to the south is a bog. It is bad news the moment cover comes off, because bare sand on a slope moves in the first hard rain. The rough grade at the end of an overgrown-lot job here is set to shed water without cutting a gully, and anything outside the building footprint gets mulched so the mat holds the soil while grass comes back. The other thing the growth hides on a Lumberton lot is water. A surprising number of tracts in this town have a slough, a wet-weather drainage or a bottom edge running toward Village Creek or Pine Island Bayou, and it is invisible until the yaupon is down. Village Creek left its banks in a big way during Harvey and again in Imelda, so a lot down in the creek corridor has its own flood history that the uplands above it do not share. That wet edge is usually the part of the lot to leave alone, both because it drains the rest of the tract and because ground that stays wet can carry jurisdiction that makes clearing it a bigger question than the machine work.

Growth subdivisions have a trap that older towns do not. A lot that looks like raw woods may already have water, electric and fiber run to it, and a gas line or a pipeline easement along the road frontage, because the developer put them in before the growth came back. Texas811 is called before any machine unloads and the marks are honored, and any pipeline marker or old lease road on the tract gets a separate call to whoever owns it. Access is the last piece. These lots are reached down long drives through timber, often across a low spot, and that drive has to carry the lowboy in and the concrete trucks later. If the approach cannot take it, building the drive becomes the first step of clearing the lot rather than the last, and it is one the owner keeps. Debris on a wooded Lumberton lot has options that in-town lots do not: mulching in place, burning where Hardin County allows it on the day, or haul-off. Hardin County's ban comes and goes, TCEQ outdoor burning rules apply either way, and the quote carries a mulch-or-haul number for any morning the burn is off.