210 Harper: THE ‘‘PocosIn” oF PIKE County, ALA. 
In Dr. Eugene A. Smith’s description of Pike County in his 
report on the agricultural features of Alabama (Tenth Census 
U. S. 6: 151; Geol. Surv. Ala., Report for 1881 and 1882, p. 522. 
1884) these observations of Thornton’s are briefly referred to. 
About the same time, in the 9th volume of the Tenth Census 
(p. 528), Dr. Charles Mohr published some more definite informa- 
tion about the vegetation of the same place, as follows: 
“*PrkE CountTy.—On the broad ridges which form the divide between the waters 
of the Pea and Conecuh rivers, upon a purely sandy soil, are found, within the forest 
of long-leaved pine, tracts with strictly-defined outlines from a half mile to several 
miles in width, covered with a dense vegetation of small trees and shrubs peculiar to 
the perpetually moist and cool hummocks* of the coast. The soil covered with this 
growth presents no unusual features; it is as poor and arid as that covering the rest 
of these heights. Surrounded on all sides by pine forests, not a single pine tree is 
seen within the limits of these glades, called by the inhabitants ‘ pogosines,’ an Indian 
name the meaning of which I was unable to learn. 
“The trees are of small growth, the willow oak, the water oak, beech, red maple, 
and black gum rarely rising to a height of more than 30 feet among the sourwoods, 
junipers, hornbeams, hollies, papaws, fringe trees, red bays, and other trees of the 
coast. These glades verge upon deep ravines from which issue large springs, and 
from this fact I conclude that, below their sandy, porous soil, strata must exist 
perpetually moistened by subterranean waters near enough to the surface to supply 
the moisture necessary to support such a luxuriant vegetation.” 
There seems to be no reference to this interesting place in 
Dr. Smith’s report on the geology of the coastal plain of Alabama 
(1895), or in Dr. Mohr’s Plant Life of Alabama (1901). In the 
summer of 1906 Dr. Smith and the writer were in Pike County 
together for a short time, and heard ts of the “‘pocosin,” 
which led Dr. Smith to make his first visit to it a little later. 
In 1910 a soil survey of Pike County was made by W. E. Tharp, 
of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and W. L. Lett and W. E. 
Wilkinson, representing the State; and on the map accompanying 
their report, published in December, 1911, the location of the 
pocosin is shown, probably for the first time, but there is not a 
word about it in the text. Stranger still, its soil is not differentiated 
on the map from that of the surrounding country (“Norfolk 
coarse sand’’), although it does differ in at least one important 
particular. 
* Dr. Mohr doubtless wrote ‘‘ hammocks,” as he did in his Plant Life of Alabama 
17 years later, but it was evidently changed to ‘‘hummocks”’ in Washington, as it was 
throughout the 5th and 6th volumes of the same series, except on the maps, and one 
or two places in the text that escaped the proof-readers. (See Geol. Surv. Ala. 
Monog. 8: 83. 1913.) 
