Many Green 

 Mountains 



The Appalachians from Maine to Alabama, 

 and the Eastern Piedmont 



Although much of this province today still looks, from the air at 

 least, like a mountainous green wilderness, and although a great 

 deal of it back from the highways is a wilderness, its surface 

 covering of vegetation is not, except in very limited areas, what 

 it was before the coming of the white man. We would like to 

 know what it did look like in that bygone era. This is synon- 

 ymous with inquiring what the Pilgrim Fathers saw when they 

 landed at the rock they named Plymouth, and it must be to a 

 very great extent a matter of reconstruction, for most of Ap- 

 palachia has been altogether changed not once, like the other 

 countries of North America, but twice in the three hundred 

 years since that eventful day. 



The activities of this continent's new inhabitants who came 

 mostly from Europe and West Africa are not of any concern 

 to us, but it must be emphasized here that almost the whole 

 face of Appalachia was once completely altered by those people 

 through deforestation. This was done for the most part to create 

 pasture land for the raising of sheep, and it extended in many 

 cases in the northern areas to the very tops of the fairly high 

 — for the area — mountain ranges, so that all the way from 

 Maine to Tennessee stone walls and homestead foundations of 

 colonial age may be found right up to, and even on, the summits 

 of some of the highest ridges. Also, this country was the source 

 of iron ore, as well as bog iron, and the forests were slashed and 

 cropped to the ground in vast swaths to make charcoal for the 

 smelting furnaces. Then, later, there was a mass exodus of rural 

 New Englanders; the upland sheep pastures were depopulated 

 of their ovine hordes; weeds and scrub took over; and even- 

 tually a secondary forest, for the most part unprepossessing, 

 grew up. Despite the wildernesses of Maine, the vast preserved 

 forests of the Adirondacks, and the allegedly backwoods lands of 

 the Alleghenies, there are few places where truly pre-Columbian 

 nature has been preserved. Nonetheless, there are such places; 

 and from them, from early records, and from the results we can 

 see today of nature's own efforts to reproduce or re-create the 

 face of her postglacial youth, we may gain some idea of what 

 Appalachia looked like before our ancestors arrived. 



sandy, pebbly, or muddy and gently shelving in the south. It was 

 once clothed in an almost endless blanket of greenery; a mixed 

 forest of hardwoods and pines, the latter predominantly of one 

 species (Finns strobus). It is a continental, not a coastal, land, 

 and it forms the eastern or right-hand tine of the great V of 

 highlands that forms the framework of this continent. 



The vegetation of the northern half of this province extends 

 south almost to its southern extremity along the highest ridge 

 of the Blue Ridge Mountains, forming a narrow tongue. Wrapped 

 around this tongue from Kentucky on the northwest side, south 

 through Tennessee to Alabama, thence east through Georgia and 

 northeast to about the southern border of Virginia, on the lower 

 slopes, among the foothills, and filling the valleys is another 

 type of forest of considerable luxuriance. This is the true Wood- 

 land Deciduous, broad-leafed forest. The bottomlands are mostly 

 rich pastures, but the rivers are lined with woods and marshes; 

 the hillsides are clothed in closed-canopy forests of many kinds 

 of oak and hickory, walnut, some birches, alder, hazelnut, horn- 

 beam, willow, poplar, elm, magnolia, tulip trees, laurels, sassa- 

 fras, planes, maples, ash, horse chestnut, and a few acacias. 

 Beneath the canopy and in more exposed places an equally 

 luxuriant undergrowth spreads. This contains many magnolias 

 and numerous species of rhododendron, kalmia, and related 

 plants. This undergrowth extends high up the mountains and 

 may spread also under the pines or even form an almost alpine 

 type of growth without trees but with open grassy glades 

 between the bushes. When the rhododendrons are in bloom the 

 hills look as if they had been painted, and photographs of them 

 are reminiscent of old-time, hand-tinted picture postcards. 



It is this horseshoe-shaped swath of foothill and piedmont 

 country that is the real "South," rather than the pine-covered 

 lowlands and coastal plains. It is here that the richest soils are 

 to be found, and it is this portion of this province that enjoys 

 the most abundant rainfall, combined with moderate tempera- 

 ture and winds, all year round. It was not recently glaciated, 

 and to it retreated both the fauna and flora that were driven out 

 of the north by the ice: in turn, that same fauna and flora acted 

 as a reservoir from which the lands released from under the ice 

 were restocked, most of the animals and many of the plants 

 spreading north as the climate ameliorated. But other plants and 

 some animals stayed behind, either because they had been 

 initially indigenous to more southern latitudes or because the 

 winters farther north were still too rugged. It is important to 

 appreciate this fact, for the fauna and flora of the eastern side 

 of this continent is — and apparently has been since very long 

 ago— isolated from that of the west side by the great intervening 

 prairies and steppes. Its only connection is around the top of 

 the prairies via Canada, and when this route was cut off by 

 icecaps, the plants and animals of the east had nowhere to go 

 but south into southern Appalachia. Had the ice gone only a 

 little farther south, both would have been driven out into the 

 Caribbean and extinguished forever. 



Appalachia has its quota of oddities, ranging from isolated 

 patches of spruce forest in western Maine and in the central 

 Adirondacks to the shifting sand dunes of southern Maine. 

 Throughout the parallel ranges of the Alleghenies and the 

 Appalachians proper (often called the Blue Ridge), there are 

 many beautiful though — to the eyes of those from more moun- 



THE REFUGE 



We can see from the map that this land is a mountainous one 

 and that it has a limited coast line, rocky and steep in the north 



The Chipmunk, a small ground-living squirrel, helps land- 

 scape the country. All summer and fall it buries nuts which 

 it often forgets to eat. and which then sprout, creating new 

 woodlands. 



