Tree Service in Fair Grove, MO

It fits that Tree Service in Fair Grove matters to people here: the town was named after a grove of trees that reminded early settlers of Fairgrove, North Carolina, where many of them came from. A post office has used the name since 1856. Today Fair Grove has about 1,582 residents on 3.19 square miles along U.S. 65, roughly 14 miles north of Springfield, and the grove has spread into the oaks, hickories and eastern red cedars that surround most homes in and around town.

January 2007

When the great ice storm hit in January 2007, a Fair Grove resident told a Springfield TV station years later that more than 30 trees fell onto his driveway, a mix of oaks, hickories and cedars. That is a useful picture of how ice treats this landscape. Hickories and oaks with long horizontal limbs break under the weight. Cedars, which hold their foliage all winter, collect ice on every branch and bend, split or uproot. On a wooded lot north of Springfield, a single bad ice storm can block a drive in a dozen places.

May 2009

Two years later, the May 2009 derecho that crossed the southern Plains destroyed part of Fair Grove High School and drew national attention to the town. The community afterward built a FEMA-funded storm shelter and safe room, completed by May 2013, that students and residents can use during tornado warnings. A derecho is a long-lived line of straight-line wind, and the damage pattern is different from a tornado: trees go down in the same direction across a wide area, and trees at the edge of an opening, like a yard cut out of the woods, take the worst of it.

Getting ahead of the next one

You cannot storm-proof a tree, but you can lower the odds that it fails onto something important. On Fair Grove properties, the work that pays off is fairly consistent:

• Removing dead and dying trees that can reach the house, shop or drive
• Reducing long, heavy limbs on oaks and hickories over roofs
• Taking out cedars crowded against the house, which load up with ice and hold moisture against siding
• Clearing the edge of the woods so the yard line is not a wall of trees leaning toward the opening
• Grinding stumps after removals so the lawn can be mowed
• Checking ash trees, since emerald ash borer has been confirmed in Greene County since 2018

A town with deep roots

The Boegel and Hine Flour Mill, also known as the Wommack Mill, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, and corn-grinding demonstrations there are part of the Heritage Reunion, held the last full weekend of September with roughly 400 booths. Many older homes near the square have trees that are as much a part of the place as the mill. When an old shade tree in that part of town starts to decline, our first question is whether careful pruning can keep it safe, not how fast it can come down.

Talk to us about your property

Call (417) 374-2037 or send the form. Let us know whether you are in town or out on acreage and what you want done with the wood. We give every estimate in writing. Get a free estimate