Dash Tree Service Stopped Doing Land Clearing.
We Handle That Work Now.

If You Were Looking for Dash, Here Is Where the Work Went

Dash Tree Service has been a Newbury fixture since 1981. Over that run they cleared a lot of ground in this county — building sites, back lots, fence rows, and woods that had gotten away from people. Dave has retired from that side of the business and now concentrates on stump removal.

That leaves a real gap for property owners who have called the same number for years. We are not affiliated with Dash and we did not take over their company — we are a separate land clearing outfit working the same townships. But we do all of the clearing work they no longer take, and this page exists so you are not left guessing who to call.

If you typed dashtreeservice.com to get here, that is why — this page sits at that address so nobody looking for Dash’s old clearing service ends up at a dead end.

Forty-Five Years of Dash Tree Service

Dave Pitz started Dash Tree Service in 1981 and ran it out of Newbury for more than four decades. That is a long time to keep a piece of equipment running in one township, and longer still to keep the phone ringing on word of mouth alone — Dash never had a website. People called because somebody down the road told them to.

The part of the operation most people never saw was the sawmill. By the early 1990s the tree service and land clearing work was generating more logs than a yard could hold, so rather than pay to get rid of them Pitz built a mill. Dash Sawmills was incorporated in 1994 and turned that log pile into hardwood cut stock — poplar, oak, ash, maple, basswood — shipped to markets in Cleveland and beyond. It is a genuinely unusual thing for a tree service to do, and it says something about how the business was run.

Dash shows up in the public record of this community in the way long-running local businesses do: on the Newbury Local School District’s list of largest taxpayers in the state audits from 2001 and 2003, and among the supporters of the Western Reserve Land Conservancy. Four and a half decades of clearing lots, dropping hazard trees, and reclaiming fence rows across Geauga County and well beyond it — Dash turns up on approved-contractor lists in communities across this corner of Northeast Ohio.

Dave has stepped back from the clearing side of that. He still takes stump grinding, and we would encourage you to call him for it. The rest of the work is what the rest of this page is about.

The Old Dash Service List, Sorted Out

Every job Dash used to take on the clearing side, and where it goes now.

New Caterpillar Iron, Built for This Exact Work

Our primary machine is a Caterpillar 275 XE Land Management compact track loader running an integrated Cat HM418 mulching head. That pairing matters: this is a purpose-built forestry system where the carrier recognizes the attachment and optimizes hydraulic flow to it, not a general-purpose skid steer with a mulcher bolted on the front.

It grinds brush, saplings, and trees up to 8 inches in a single pass. Ground pressure is 4.5 PSI — lighter than a person standing on soft dirt — so it works wet spring ground and kettle margins without leaving the ruts a dozer or a loaded truck would. For genuinely steep ground, from 20 up to 55 degrees, we bring in an FAE remote-controlled steep-slope mulcher and run it with nobody on the hill.

The practical result on your property: no burn piles, no dump trucks coming and going, no debris fees, and your topsoil still where it belongs. The cleared material becomes a 2–3 inch mulch layer that holds moisture, slows erosion, and suppresses regrowth for a season or two while it breaks down.

Mulching vs. The Old Clear-and-Haul Method

If you had Dash out years ago, the job probably looked like this: cut it, pile it, burn it or truck it away, then grind the stumps. That approach works, and for some jobs it is still the right call. But it moves your topsoil around, leaves bare dirt exposed to the next rain, and the disposal is a real line item.

Forestry mulching collapses that into one pass. The machine drives through the vegetation and grinds it at ground level, and what used to be a debris problem becomes ground cover. On a typical residential lot that is the difference between a multi-day operation with trucks and a one- or two-day job with one machine.

Where a dozer genuinely is the better tool — heavy commercial work, jobs that need grading, situations where the soil itself has to come out — we will tell you that. We wrote a full honest comparison of mulching versus bulldozing if you want to think it through before you call anyone.

Four Counties Across Northeast Ohio

Dash worked this whole corner of the state for 45 years. We cover the same ground: Geauga, Cuyahoga, and Lake. If Dash ever cleared for you, you are almost certainly inside our area.

Every township and community we cover has its own page — ground conditions, what grows there, and what a job actually looks like. Start with Newbury, browse all of Geauga or Cuyahoga, or find yours on the locations map.

Why Newbury Ground Is Different

Newbury and Auburn sit on the thickest sand and gravel deposits in Geauga County — the drift runs nearly 300 feet deep toward the north. That ground drains fast, which means we can get on a lot here weeks before the heavier clay townships are firm enough to carry equipment.

The flip side is the kettle-and-kame terrain: short steep sides around flat wet bottoms, and kettles that drain one into the next rather than out to a stream. A lot that looks bone dry in August can hold water in April. We plan around it — trails ring the kettles instead of crossing them, and mulched fence strips get set back from the soft margins.

It changes county to county. The Cuyahoga side runs to the heavier lake-plain and valley soils that hold water longer, and the Geauga uplands pick up the steeper ravine grades where the remote-controlled machine earns its keep. We quote off what your ground actually is, not a flat rate for the region.

And Why You Should Take a Chance on Us

Fair question, and worth answering plainly: Dash earned its reputation over 45 years of neighbors vouching for it. We have not been at this that long. So instead of asking you to take our word for it, we have built the business so you can check it before you commit to anything.

• Our prices are published. Forestry mulching runs $2,300–$2,990 per acre, trail cutting $2,000–$2,600, brush hogging $624. There is a $1,600 project minimum that covers moving the machine. It is all on the pricing page before you call anybody.
• Fixed price, not hourly. You get a number before we start and that is the number. No meter running, no surprise hauling line item at the end, because there is nothing to haul.
• Most quotes take 15 minutes and no visit. We measure acreage and read brush density off satellite imagery, so roughly 9 out of 10 residential jobs get a fixed-price quote remotely. Put your address in the instant quote tool and see.
• We will tell you when we are the wrong call. Stumps go to Dave Pitz. Jobs that genuinely need a dozer, we say so — that is the entire point of our mulching vs. bulldozing comparison.
• The work is guaranteed and we are based right here — Newbury for Geauga and Brecksville for Cuyahoga, reaching Lake from the same yards. We work the same townships Dash did, and we are not a crew driving in from two counties over.

If you want to see the full range before deciding, start with land clearing, the forestry mulching method behind it, or the FAQ.

Questions from Former Dash Customers