Our Story
East Texas tree removal, done right.
A Local Crew That Learned Trees on the Power Lines
Cherokee County Tree Co. was started by Wade Tolliver, who grew up in Rusk, the Cherokee County seat, and spent eight seasons on a utility line-clearance crew working the rights-of-way across Cherokee and Smith counties. Line clearance is where you learn what a loblolly pine does in a straight-line wind, how a red oak limb loads up under ice, and how to take a tree apart in pieces when there's a house on one side and a primary line on the other. In 2016 Wade started the company in Jacksonville, Texas with one bucket truck and a chipper, taking the same careful, piece-by-piece approach he'd learned on the lines and putting it to work for homeowners instead of utilities.
Today the company is a crew of four working out of Jacksonville, TX and covering the Piney Woods towns around it. The work is tree work, not lawn-and-landscape: tree removal, stump grinding, tree trimming, and land clearing, done safely and priced in writing before a saw starts. East Texas trees are a specific problem set — tall pines on sandy loam over clay that heave in a wet spring, sweetgum and post oak that drop deadwood every year, and the southern pine beetle that turns a green pine brown in a season — and the crew has spent years learning them. Every job starts with an on-site look, an honest read on whether the tree really needs to come down, and a written price. Every job ends with the trunk, brush, and chips gone and the yard looking like the crew was never there.
Four Services
We do four things: tree removal, stump grinding, tree trimming, and land clearing. We don't mow, mulch beds, or install landscaping, and we don't take on commercial contract work that would pull the crew away from the homeowners who call us. If your job is one of the four, we're the right call. If it isn't, we'll tell you.
Our Why
Wade started this company in 2016 because too many East Texas homeowners were stuck choosing between a big outfit that drives in from out of the area, quotes high, and leaves the brush, or a truck-and-a-chainsaw operator with no insurance who'll drop a pine and hope it lands in the yard. Eight seasons on a line-clearance crew taught him there's a better way to do it: take the tree apart in sections, rig every piece that could hit something, and treat a routine backyard removal with the same care as a storm call. We built Cherokee County Tree Co. to be that crew for Jacksonville, TX — small, insured, local, and honest about what a tree needs.
Loblolly pine, post oak, sweetgum, hickory, and red oak all fail differently, and the sandy loam over clay under most of Cherokee County changes how a root plate holds in a wet spring. We look at the whole tree — root flare, trunk, and crown — before recommending anything.
Tree work is dangerous, especially beside a house, a fence, or a power line. We don't skip the rigging to save an hour, and Wade or Colt walks every property in person before a plan is set.
You get a written estimate before any work starts. If a pine is beetle-killed and needs to come down this month, we'll say so. If a leaning oak has been leaning that way for thirty years and is fine, we'll say that too.
A job isn't done when the tree is on the ground. It's done when the trunk sections, limbs, brush, and chips are gone and the yard looks the way it did before we pulled in, minus the tree.
We're a crew of four on purpose. Meet the crew behind every job.
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