Andy Hackney has one of the first clasping four-in-one buckets in Cherokee County, AL, on his front end loader, which he calls Fifi.

“We call her Fifi because she was made in France,” said Deanna Hackney, Andy’s wife and partner in Hackney Dirtworks Inc. of Cedar Bluff, AL.

Andy prefers working with a front end loader — a 943 Caterpillar — instead of a bulldozer, “because I like the varied capabilities of a front end loader,” he said. “It can grade both forward and backward and it can load and pile brush with ease and can load dirt.

“I prefer using it around the lake [Lake Weiss, a growing area in Cherokee County] where there is a lot of site preparation. It has high horsepower, yet it is light-weight and doesn’t get bogged down as much as a bulldozer,” he said.

“I like it for clearing land,” Andy Hackney said, “pushing the trees up with the teeth you don’t get as much dirt so the brush burns easier.”

Andy founded the company five years ago as a part-time venture and began working fulltime at the business in February — an event that coincided with his and Deanna’s wedding.

He works with his brother Randy Hackney, who owns the Komatsu D38 bulldozer (unnamed as yet) they use in the business for grading and leveling pads.

“Our parent company is Hackney Welding,” Andy Hackney said, a company owned by his father John Hackney, who has been a heavy equipment contractors for Norfolk Southern Railroad for 32 years.

As a youth, Andy Hackney learned to operate a front end loader from H. F. Holden, a heavy equipment operator for Norfolk Southern.

“Mr. Holden could do miraculous things with a loader,” Andy Hackney said. “He loads the loader on the back of a flatbed lowboy and doesn’t even use ramps. He just ’walks’ it on.”

Andy Hackney last year helped Holden move a ’retired’ caboose 16 miles to Lake Weiss “for a family to use as a boat house. After we moved it on a flatbed, we used two loaders to carry it the last 100 yards to the lake’s edge.”

After working with Holden as a youngster, Andy Hackney became a supervisor overseeing construction crews for Norfolk Southern. He took some college courses and raced motorcycles.

“I decided in 1995 to start my own business, and worked at it weekends, then decided to go fulltime recently,” he said.

“His wife talked him into it,” Deanna said.

Hackney Dirtworks Inc. does land clearing, site preparation and hauling in Northwest Georgia and Northeast Alabama.

The company does primarily residential work and some commercial work as well.

“We get a lot of calls for compaction, fill dirt and topsoil that we dig and load, using the loader,” Andy Hackney said.

Other equipment in the Hackney stable includes a 14-yard tandem dump truck — a Ford LT 8000 named Big Red, (because it’s red), a Ford 555C backhoe named Fergie (just because they wanted an English name) — used for digging septic tanks, field lines, house footings, small ponds and drainage ditches, and a Bobcat (no, they don’t call it Bob) for light landscape work and dressing up around job sites.

Andy Hackney said he plans to expand his business because the area he serves is growing.

That’s fine with his wife, who said the agreement is “for every new piece of equipment he buys, I get a baby.”

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