Land Clearing and Lot Clearing in Pittsylvania County
Danville Tree Care & Removal clears building sites, fence lines, pasture, and overgrown acreage across Pittsylvania County and the surrounding Southside Virginia area. Selective or full clearing, with the debris handled — not pushed into a pile at the back of your property and left. Free estimates. Call (434) 216-5589.
Selective clearing versus full clearing
Full clearing takes everything down to bare ground. It’s what a building pad usually needs.
Selective clearing keeps what’s worth keeping. On most rural parcels around here that’s the better answer: leave the mature white oaks and the shade over the house site, take the sweetgum and the volunteer pine that filled in the old field. It costs a little more per acre because it requires decisions instead of a bulldozer, and it’s worth it — a mature hardwood is worth thousands in property value and shade, and you cannot put it back.
We’ll walk the parcel with you and mark what stays before anything starts.
What we clear
Building sites and pads — cleared, stumped, and grubbed to the footprint your builder gives us.
Fence lines and property lines — the strip work that lets you actually run wire, plus the maintenance clearing that keeps a line from disappearing again in three years.
Pasture reclamation — Pittsylvania County is the largest county in Virginia by land area, and a lot of it is old tobacco and hay ground that went back to pine and briar. Bringing it back is grinding and grubbing work, and it’s most of what we do out here.
Driveways and access roads — clearing a route in before the gravel goes down.
Overgrown lots — in-town parcels that have gone twenty years without a mower.
The permits and burn rules you need to know
Land disturbance. Pittsylvania County requires a land disturbance permit for disturbing more than 10,000 square feet. Tilling, planting, or harvesting agricultural, horticultural, or forest crops is exempt, as is minor landscaping under that threshold. Denuded areas have to be stabilized within seven days. County Community Development handles it at 434-432-1767. We’ll tell you which side of that line your project falls on.
Virginia’s 4 PM Burning Law. From February 15 through April 30 every year, open-air burning is banned before 4 p.m. if the fire is within 300 feet of woods or dry grass that could carry fire into the woods. Burning is allowed from 4 p.m. to midnight with proper precautions and constant attendance. Violation is a Class 3 misdemeanor with a fine up to $500 — and, critically, whoever started the fire is responsible for suppression costs if it escapes, regardless of precautions taken or permits obtained.
Burning inside town limits is generally off the table. Virginia regulation 9VAC5-130-40 permits on-site burning of leaves and yard trimmings only where no regularly scheduled collection service is available at the adjacent street. Chatham, Gretna, and South Boston all run collection — so in those towns, brush is a haul-off cost, not a bonfire.
Not sure how bad it is? We will come look and tell you straight. The estimate is free.
Erosion is the part that bites people afterward
Piedmont red clay — the Cecil, Madison, and Cullen soils that make up roughly 37% of the Pittsylvania County soil survey area — is deep and well drained, and highly erodible on slope once you strip the cover off it. The USDA survey is blunt that slope is the main limitation on logging equipment here.
Practically: don’t clear a hillside in February and leave it bare until May. We stage clearing so exposed ground gets stabilized, and we’ll tell you if the sequence you’re planning is going to send your topsoil into a creek.
Most clearing work is out in unincorporated county — Blairs and Mount Hermon especially, where there are no town rules and no brush pickup at all, so everything leaves on our truck. We also clear around Chatham, Gretna and Yanceyville.
Land Clearing FAQs
How is clearing priced?
By the acre for open work, by the hour or the day for selective and difficult-access work. Density, stem size, slope, wet ground, and what happens to the debris drive it more than raw acreage does.
What happens to the wood and brush?
Chipped, hauled, or — on larger rural jobs where it’s permitted and appropriate — stacked or burned under the rules above. Merchantable timber may be worth having a forester look at before you grind it into chips, and we’ll say so if that’s the case.
Do you grub stumps or just cut?
Either. Cutting flush is cheaper; grubbing removes the stump and root ball and is what a building pad or a pasture that has to be mowed actually needs. Say which one you need and it goes on the estimate.
Call (434) 216-5589 to walk your property.
Get a Free Estimate
Call and you will talk to somebody local.
Or send us the details and we will come look.