Nearly every early traveller in North America was awed by the trees, the immense scope of the forests and the stature of individual trees: Capt. John Smith wrote in his "Description of Virginia" [1612], The wood that is most common is Oke and Walnut: many of their Okes are so tall and straight, that they will beare two foote and a halfe square of good timber for 20 yards long [i.e., a tree 42" in diameter x 60' to the first branches]"[1] In the "Discovery of New Brittaine" [1650] Edward Bland observes the area around the Chowan River on the North Carolina border with Virginia, "On both sides...is very much exceeding rich land, [there] are old Indian fields that beare two Crops of Indian Corne a yeare and hath timber trees above five foot over, whose trunks are a hundred foot in cleare timber, which will make twenty Cuts of Board timber a piece, and of those there is abundance."[2] In 1664 William Hilton exploring in the lower Cape Fear River basin made this observation, "We measured many of the Oaks in several places, which we found to be in bignesse some two, some three, and others almost four fathoms." We may assume that Hilton's men were measuring with a sounding line which they stretched around these trees; a tree four fathoms--24 feet in circumference--would be 7-1/2 feet in diameter. Hilton continues, "In height, before you come to boughs or limbs, forty, fifty, sixty foot, and some more, and those Oaks very common in the upper parts of [the river]. Likewise Walnut, Birch, Beech, Maple, Ash, Bay, Willough, Alder and Holly; and in the lowermost parts [of the river] innumerable of Pines, tall and good for boards or masts..."[3] In 1666 Robert Horne observed of the country around Charleston, "The whole Country consists of stately Woods, Groves, Marshes, and Meadows; it abounds with variety of as brave Okes as Eye can behold, great Bodies tall and streight from 60 to 80 foot, before there be any Boughs, which with the little under-wood makes the Woods very commodious to travel in, either on Horseback or a foot."[4] Horne's observation is paralleled by that of Andrew White: [1634] "The Woods for the most part are free from underwood, so that a man may travel on horsebacke, almost anywhere, or hunt for his recreation."[5] Such open woods suggest a forest ecology radically different from what we know today.[6]
It is these forests, these trees, I try to get my students to imagine who have never seen more than the remaining trash woods we now call forest in the South or on the Domain. Would that their rainforest passion could be turned backward and made historical just for a moment. Perhaps if they could look back and see what we have lost they might understand Philip Fithian's comment about the sorrow of the Indians who saw these trees, forests, lands, rivers, brought to ruin; Fithian wrote, "It is no small thing, I suppose, that would make an Indian weep--but, ah, these were pleasant places." So incapacitated are we of understanding that, knowing only the diminuitive saplings of butchered forests, we declaim against the early writers saying that they exaggerated or that they had imprecise measurments. William Bartram, however, leaves little doubt: [The scene in southeastern Georgia] "continuing some time through these shady groves, the scene opens, and discloses to view the most magnificent forest I had ever seen....The ground is perfectly a level green plain, thinly planted by nature with the most stately forest trees, such as the gigantic black oak (q. tinctoria) liriodendron, [etc.] whose mighty trunks, seemingly of an equal height, appeared like superb columns. To keep with the bounds of truth and reality, in describing the magnitude and grandeur of these trees, would, I fear, fail of credibility; yet, I think I can assert, that many of the black oaks measured eight, nine, ten and eleven feet diameter five feet above the ground, as we measured several that were above thirty feet girt, and from hence they ascend perfectly straight, with a gradual taper, forty or fifty feet to the limbs."[7] It is no wonder I believe that Bartram saw in these natural scenes confirmation of his belief in God: "Having in this journey, met with extraordinary success...in making a very extensive collection of new discoveries of natural productions; on the recollection of so many and great favors and blessings, I now, with a high sense of gratitude, presume to offer up my sincere thanks to the Almighty, the Creator and Preserver."[8]
By the end of the Eighteenth century most of these great eastern groves were cut, but some great tracts remained in the mountains. In 1867 John Muir echoes Bartram's awe and wonder as he crosses Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia on his walk to Florida: [September 2, 1867] "Folding my map, I shouldered my little bag and plant press and strode away among the old Kentucky oaks...not, however, without a few cold shadows of lonliness, although the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome....I have seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur all I had ever before beheld. They are broad and dense and bright green. In the leafy bowers and caves of their long branches dwell magnificent avenues of shade, and every tree seems to be blessed with a double portion of strong exulting life."[9] [September 9] "The soft light of morning falls upon ripening forests of oak and elm, walnut and hickory, and all Nature is thoughtful and calm. Kentucky is the greenest, leafiest State I have yet seen....Far the grandest of all Kentucky plants are her noble oaks. They are the master existences of her exuberant forests. Here is the Eden, the paradise of oaks."[10]
[September 18] "Up the mountain on the state line [east of Madisonville, TN in the Unaka mountains]. The scenery is far grander than any I ever before beheld. The view extends from the Cumberland Mountains on the north far into Georgia and North Carolina to the south, an area of about five thousand square miles. Such an ocean of wooded, waving, swelling mountains beauty and grandeur is not to be described. Countless forest-clad hills, side by side in rows and groups, seemed to be enjoying the rich sunshine and remaining motionless only because they were so eagerly absorbing it. All were united by curves and slopes of inimitable softness and beauty. Oh, these forest gardens of our Father! What perfection, what divinity, in their architecture! What simplicity and mysterious complexity of detail! Who shall read the teaching of these sylvan pages, the glad brotherhood of rills that sing in the valleys, and all the happy creatures that dwell in them under the tender keeping of a Father's care?"[11]
It was not a quiet garden, however. Muir was fortunate to have seen it before the ruin of timbering and mining swept across the land; I wonder what categories of description he would now invoke to describe the strip-mined hills of Kentucky and Tennessee, the Copper Basin on the North Carolina border where he crossed over from Tennessee. Already there had been presage: as he passed Elizabethton, Ky, he noted in his journal for September 3, 1867, "Passed gangs of woodmen engaged in felling and hewing the grand oaks for market." [12] The attack upon the Kentucky forests followed almost upon Muir's heels. In "Night Comes to the Cumberlands," Harry Caudill writes, "A sustained logging boom accompanied the drive of the timber companies to buy up the best of the trees. For some forty years after 1870 thousands of mountaineers toiled a large part of each year to produce logs for the downriver markets."[13] Caudill's description of this forest matches Muir's and other early travellers: "...generally the timber began at the 'foot' of the hills and extended upward over the 'spurs' and 'points' and through the rich coves to the tops of the ridges. The great poplars and whiteoaks grew, for the most part, near the base of the hills and in the coves, while the lesser oaks and chestnuts predominated on the sharper points an near the hilltops. Countless walnuts dotted the forest, thousands of them without blemish and a yard or more in diameter. The Goliaths were the superb, pencil-straight poplars, some of them towering one hundred and seventy-five feet and achieving a diameter of seven or eight feet. Next to these in value, if not in size, were the whiteoaks, which sometimes reached a thickness in excess of five feet....No region in earth's temperate zone boasts a larger variety of forest trees than the Cumberland Plateau, and in these years they abounded in natural profusion, little damaged by the avarice or caprice of men."
Avarice and caprice would rule the day, however: the impoverished mountaineers sold the trees for a pittance to buyers who knew their real worth. "Thousands of trees were sold for a little as forty to seventy-five cents each. Few of them brought more than a dollar. One deed, executed in 1889...recites, 'that for...the sum of $20,000, the grantor hereby...sells...unto the grantee 40,000 poplar and whiteoak trees, each of said trees to measure not less than 30 inches in diameter under the bark, stump high, measuring three feet above the ground, without fire damage or blemish...'"[14] Using the destructive "splash dam" method of getting the logs out of the forest--where log ponds are created by daming the mountain streams and then blasting the dams to create a cascade to carry the logs downstream--the Kentucky forests were cut: "The runs made deep inroads into the vast forest, and commenced its reduction to the pitiful remnant of cull and second-growth which cloaks the plateau today."[15]
This is the same land surveyed by Gilbert Imlay in 1791 when he addressed the inhabitants of Kentucky, "In your country, like the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, that spring out of vallies and hills, a land of wheat and barley, and all kinds of fruits, you shall eat bread without scarceness, and not lack anything in it...Thus, your country, favored with the smiles of heaven, will probably be inhabited by the first people the world ever knew."[16] If you read this passage today in Pineville or Hazard Kentucky, few would think Imlay was describing the land where they live. So complete the ruin, the loss, the alteration and dimunition from original condition that no one of us could say, "This is Kentucky or Tennessee."
Now the myth of paradise is turned on its head, inverted, and we have the lost-garden world of Night Comes to the Cumberlands. The same ruin of the world is described in Georgia in Erskine Caldwell'sTobacco Road. The South of Edenic plenty had experienced the distributed consequences of the Fall. The benign imagery had shifted; now it seemed almost as if such a torpid, torrid, profligate world had to be punished, ravished, for its sinfulness. And ravished it was. The deforestation of planters in the first half of the 19th Cent. was continued by loggers in the last half abetted by increasing use of steam power and the pull of larger markets. By 1900 most of the best was gone; by 1930 what was left interested only marginal loggers who could not afford to move west. Another half century of high-grading stripped the remaining isolated good trees as quickly as they matured leaving finally a waste wood economically and aesthetically suitable only for stripping and chipping. Garden had become barren; blessing had become curse, no less for the whites who cast their forests down the hillsides than for the Indians who killed game far beyond their needs for food and clothing.
Faulkner's stories, "The Old People" and "The Bear" in Go Down Moses chronicle the loss of the forest: each year as the company of hunters makes the trip to the great woods, it takes longer to get into the forest. Logging and settlements had come to the forest and its edge steadily receded before the hunters. From the hunting camp they could hear the locomotive hauling out the logs. In the old forest, the men's memories had threaded and twisted through the trees and over the hills like the game trails themselves in one dark, matted recollection of place owned by no one. It is the complex relation to the land of Indians, slaves, whites--as confused as the blood in Sam Fathers veins--that Ike McCaslin decries, "Dont you see?" he cried. "Dont you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse?"[17] In the end Major de Spain sold most of the timber to a lumber company from Memphis and the old hunt was gone forever. In the final scene, Boon Hogginbeck goes mad beneath the Gum Tree and smashes his gun, impotent against the squirrels.
In Tennessee the nadir of our forests was reached perhaps by 1930. The timber had already been cut, but now the land bore the consequence of the ruined forests as erosion became endemic. Large gullies cut the land at every turn dumping massive amounts of silt into the rivers. Thousands of acres of stumps could be seen across the land. Since the Great Depression, a variety of forces have combined to partially restore the forest and heal the land. Steadily, the abandoned stump groves re-sprouted or were naturally re-seeded. Modern forestry management practices and stricter logging laws began to be applied. Forest fires and hog grazing, mentioned by John Foley in his 1903 report on the forest of the University of the South, were effectively eliminated as retarding factors in the rengeneration of the forest.[18] A genuine and determined conservation movement was born, led in part but significantly by representatives of the lumber industry. Today in Franklin County and across Tennessee there is more tree cover than at any time since the 1930's. Although timber continued to be cut in the recovering forest the large scale pillage of the forest of earlier decades has not been repeated.[19] To some extent the benefits of this conservation are now beginning to pay off again at least for hardwood timber production. Tree ring counts of many of the logs currently being moved to mill yards will show ages of 50-75 years. These are the trees of the local forest which have matured since the Great Depression.