Half this town is on a tank, and the map will not tell you
Water in White House comes from the White House Utility District, which draws from Old Hickory Lake and supplies a four-county area through more than a thousand miles of main. Sewer is a different story entirely. WHUD's wastewater system serves only around three thousand customers, all on the Sumner side, and the district says outright that its water boundary and its sewer boundary do not match. The city runs its own treatment plant on top of that.
The practical version: being on WHUD water tells you nothing about whether you are on sewer. A large share of the outer-ring properties out along Palmers Chapel Road, Wilkinson Lane and the upper end of Sage Road have a private tank and drainfield somewhere in the yard, and that field is not drawn on any public map a contractor can pull up.
What 811 covers, and the long list it does not
Tennessee 811 is a free call and it should be made. Allow three working days for the marks. What comes back is public infrastructure: gas, electric, telecom, public water and sewer mains up to the point where they stop being the utility's responsibility.
Everything private is yours. That means the septic tank and its laterals, an irrigation system, an invisible fence loop, low-voltage landscape lighting, a propane run out to a fire pit or a grill, and the buried downspout drains that almost every new White House build has running from the gutters out to daylight. Those last ones catch people constantly on Legacy Farms and Fields of Oakland lots, where the sod went down over them and nobody has seen them since. A grinder wheel does not know the difference between a root and a corrugated drain.
How to actually find your field
Start with paperwork. The septic permit and as-built drawing for a Tennessee system is a county environmental record, and if you bought the house recently the inspection file may already have it. That drawing gives you tank location and the direction the lines run, which is usually all we need.
Without paperwork, there are decent field methods. The tank sits in line with the main sewer exit from the house, typically ten to twenty feet out. Laterals run downhill from the distribution box in parallel runs, and in a dry August they show as stripes of greener grass. A soil probe pushed in gently will find the gravel trench edges. Mark whatever you find with flags or spray paint, and tell us if the location is a best guess rather than a certainty, because we plan the route differently when it is.
Working the job once the field is known
Two separate risks, and only one of them is the grinding. Crushing is the bigger one: a machine and trailer crossing a shallow lateral repeatedly does more damage than a wheel cutting near it, so the approach route gets planned around the field even when that means a longer walk-in with the smaller machine.
The second is depth. Over a known lateral we grind conservatively, take the stump to what turf actually needs and no further, and say so on the quote rather than promising twelve inches we should not be cutting. If the stump is sitting directly on top of the drainfield and it is a large one, sometimes the right answer is a partial grind plus building the grade up over it. A cracked lateral turns a three-hundred-dollar stump into a multi-thousand-dollar excavation, and nobody wins that trade.
The short version
Call 811 and then do the second half yourself, because the drainfield, irrigation, invisible fence and buried downspout drains are all private and all unmarked. Find the as-built if you can, flag what you find, and expect the approach route rather than the grinding itself to be the thing we plan around.