PHYSIOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES IN TENNESSEE. 53 



hands of large companies that have purchased it for the coal and timber. 

 In some cases these companies permit and even encourage the original 

 inhabitants to remain upon the land, on what practically amounts to a 

 system of free tenantry, since they consider their presence desirable for 

 the protection that they may afford against forest fires and depredations 

 by timber thieves or other trespassers, as well as to furnish a source of 

 labor for the operation of mines, logging camps, and lumber mills. In 

 some other cases, however, the policy of the large landowners has been to 

 encourage the original inhabitants to remove from the tracts and in such 

 sections their former homes have gone to decay, their small mountain 

 fields are growing up in forests again, and in a few decades almost all 

 signs of civilization will have disappeared. 



Needs of the region. The future of this region offers most promise 

 through the gradual introduction of better methods of agriculture and 

 the encouragement of stock raising, along with the introduction, probably, 

 of thrifty farming classes from the better sections of Europe, if such can 

 be obtained. The further development of the coal and timber will give 

 employment to the residents and will bring other labor into the sections 

 so exploited, yet such labor does not generally add materially to the per- 

 manent prosperity of a region. The population around a logging camp 

 or a lumber mill is too often a shifting one, and usually disappears when 

 lumbering operations are over. Mining camps exercise little or no in- 

 fluence upon the general agricultural development and prosperity of the 

 community, since the energies of their inhabitants are concentrated under- 

 ground in the development of the coal that is being mined. 



HIGHLAND PLAIN. 



General description. This physiographic unit is somewhat complex 

 and is difficult to define in simple terms. From the Cumberland Plateau 

 it stretches westward approximately to the Tennessee River, where it 

 crosses the western part of the State. From an elevation of about 1,000 

 feet on the eastern border the surface of this plain slopes gently west- 

 ward to an elevation 600 to 800 feet. In Middle Tennessee, in the very 

 heart of the region thus included, the rocks which elsewhere lie horizontal 

 beneath the plain have been slightly uparched into a low dome from which 

 erosion has eaten out an oval basin 60 to 80 miles wide and 150 miles long, 

 with a surface 300 to 400 feet below the general level of the encircling 

 Highland Plain. This plain is in consequence more usually known as the 

 Highland Rim. a term, however, which ignores the true nature of the 



