The Tennessee Valley and the area along the Elk River that includes the Franklin County were once very different in appearance. About 1000 years ago a heavy, but not unbroken forest covered most of the land. Here and there were large openings created by planter Indians to grow their crops of corn, squash, and beans. These Indians were the first agriculturists in the Tennessee Valley and their agricultural and social needs led them to clear many acres of land along the fertile river bottoms and on the islands of the Tennessee and its tributary rivers. Along with fields they cleared great squares for public assembly and erected giant earthen mounds for their ceremonies. Long before 1400, however, the star of these great first planters had already set and old field succession had already reclaimed their gardens. Weathering and vegetation reduced their mounds to indistinguishable hills along the rivers.
Greater in extent and significance than the Indian clearings were the eastern long-grass prairies. These were represented along the lower Elk at its confluence with the Tennessee River and in the area around Manchester and Murfreesboro. These grasslands were true prairies with grasses that, according to one eighteenth century observer, reached to the shoulders of a man on horseback. These grasses and the low grasses that grew in the great open forests supported many grazing and browsing animals. The eastern bison roamed here in herds of thousands. Elk and deer abounded. In the surrounding forests, the black bear was common as was the large predatory cat, the eastern cougar. The high, large branches of the oaks and other trees of the forest gave roost and shelter to large flocks of wild turkeys and passenger pigeons.
Although it had no static form and had changed many times in the previous ten thousand years as the climate cooled and warmed and cooled again, this original forest is gone and is only represented today in fragments that are not sufficient in themselves to convey the sense of wilderness and grandeur they embodied. For this we must rely upon the piecemeal knowledge of that forest as it can be represented for us in places like Thumping Dick Cove and Savage Gulf or further to the east in the Joyce Kilmer Forest or in the Great Smoky Mountains. It was a forest of great trees--trees widely spaced and of great girth. Oaks of three feet diameter were common, many exceeded four feet. In the headwaters of the Duck River one traveler noted as late as 1790 that the cedars were four feet in diameter and clear of branches for forty feet above the ground. Along with the oaks were found in great numbers the hickories and walnuts. The most important tree, now extinct, was the American Chestnut which may have accounted for as much as twenty-five percent of the forest in some areas of the southern Appalachians.
Although this forest was not static, it had been stable for several hundred years prior to the European invasion of North America. The slash and burn agriculture of the planter Indians had affected only a small portion of the total forest. By comparison with later times the effects of Amerindian gardening upon rivers and streams was neglible. Even in heavy storms, the streams coursing through uncut forests and stable grasslands ran clear and cool. The clear, clean waters and the cooling shade supported dozens of species of fish, but none so attractive nor useful perhaps as the true southern trout, the colorful brookie or brook trout. Although the range of the brook trout probably did not reach into the streams of the western Cumberland Plateau, the extensive original range of this fish reached almost to Chattanooga. It was common in the Tennessee and Georgia mountains east of Chattanooga.
In the headwaters of the Elk River, the coves of the Cumberland escarpment were filled with mast bearing trees and in these natural corrals, deer and turkeys occurred in great numbers. Each cove was drained by one or more streams, and high in the cove at the juncture between the sandstone and limestone were found caves that became places of residence as well as retreat for the Indians here. Along the benches or stone shelves that reached laterally along the slope to the valley, springs were found and there were occasional veins of coal. Above the escarpment, if one followed the streams upward--if one followed say Thumping Dick Creek or Mud Creek or Wiggins Creek--from its valley course onto the plateau, one would be led into elongated laurel hells--dense streamside vegetation consisting of the interlaced branches and roots of mountain laurel, rhododendron, and miniature laurel. Rooted in the rich but thin soil of these narrow streamways, tulip poplars and chestnut oaks cast a deep shade and kept the laurel hells cool even in the hottest days of summer.
Beyond the laurel hells lay the level top of the plateau itself. Here the soil was thin but the forest cover was extensive. Oak and hickory predominated. Here and there where the soil was too thin, trees gave way to rock pans covered in lichen and other mosses.