Our Story
Central Illinois tree removal, done right.
A Local Crew That Learned Trees on the Line
Brett Aper grew up on a corn-and-soybean farm outside Mount Pulaski, then spent four seasons on a utility line-clearance crew across Logan, DeWitt and Sangamon counties and three summers of storm cleanup. That is where he learned how a silver maple over an old farmhouse fails in a June storm, how a borer-killed ash goes brittle from the top down, and how to take a cottonwood apart beside a service drop.
In 2014 he opened Logan County Tree Co. in Lincoln, Illinois with a bucket truck, a chipper and a stump grinder, and he still lives in Lincoln. Today we are a crew of four doing tree work only, never lawn care, with every job priced in writing before a saw starts and finished with the wood, brush and chips gone.
Lincoln is the only town Abraham Lincoln named with his consent before he was president, christened with watermelon juice in 1853. Old Route 66 runs past the Mill and the Railsplitter Covered Wagon, and Salt Creek and Kickapoo Creek wind through the prairie. Its trees were planted: oaks on the courthouse square, maples on the streets, cottonwood and willow on the creeks, and dead ash nearly everywhere.
Four Services
Removal, stump grinding, trimming and land clearing: those four, and nothing else. No mowing, no bed mulch, no landscape installs, and no commercial contracts that would pull the crew away from the homeowners and farm owners who call us. Bring us one of the four and we are the right crew. Bring us anything else and we will say so on the first call.
Our Why
Brett started the company because Logan County homeowners kept facing two bad choices after a storm: a big outfit up I-55 that quotes high and leaves the brush, or an uninsured pickup-and-chainsaw operator who drops a silver maple and hopes it misses the garage. Line work had shown him a third way: take the tree apart in sections and rig every piece that could hit something, on every job.
Silver maple, Bradford pear, hedgerow Osage orange and borer-killed ash each fail their own way, and a wet spring on black prairie soil loosens roots. We read the tree from root flare to crown, know which trees stand on the parkway, and keep oak pruning out of April through July, per Illinois Extension oak-wilt guidance.
Brett or Marco walks every property before a plan is set, and we never skip rigging beside a house, a garage or a service drop. When a June storm line is crossing the county, the climber waits on the ground. No one here is ever told to rush a cut.
The estimate is written before work starts. A borer-killed ash about to shed limbs on the sidewalk gets called what it is; a bur oak that has leaned toward the bean field for decades, and is fine, gets left alone.
We finish when the trunk, limbs, brush and chips are gone. Lincoln allows burning on only three days a week, the free landscape-waste site takes residents' trimmings under 12 feet, and outside town it is your fire protection district's call, so most of it leaves on our truck.
We are a crew of four on purpose. Meet the crew behind every job.
Call or request a free written estimate.
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