64 — WORKING PLAN, FOREST LANDS IN ALABAMA. 
DAMAGE TO THE Forest. 
whe forest has suffered from grazing and fires in the usual way. 
FIRES. 
To the standing timber and the reproduction fires have here wrought 
fully as much injury as on the Coosa County tract. (See Pl. III, fig. 
2.) To the soil they have done even more damage. This is so light 
and loose and erodes so easily when exposed to the weather that the 
destruction of the ground cover by repeated fires has resulted in the 
serious denudation and gullying of the steep slopes. The sand thus 
washed from the longleaf pine land fs deposited in the bottoms of the 
valleys. In many parts of the creek land these steadily increasing 
accumulations of sand are gradually changing the character of the 
growth. In places where the soil was formerly a deep, wet muck, 
upon which dense cane thickets flourished, the creeping in of the sand 
has smothered out the cane and made the conditions favorable to the 
growth of trees. Dense groves of red gum and magnolia saplings and 
poles grow in places where years ago, according to old settlers, there 
was nothing but a dense canebrake. 
GRAZING. 
The three counties in which the tract is located have passed no stock 
law, and cattle, sheep, and hogs still have free run of the woods. In 
consequence the range is heavily overstocked, is extremely poor, and 
has né ehance to recuperate. 
WINDFALL. 
The region in which this tract is situated is often visited by tor- 
nadoes, from which the forest has suffered considerably. The damage 
is most common on the tops-of high ridges where the tornadoes have 
dropped just long enough to uproot or twist off the trees on a small 
area of an acre or two, and have then risen again and passed on. 
Occasionally, however, a tornado will travel close to the ground for 
a distance of several miles, leaving behind it a broad path through 
the forest in which all the timber has been uprooted or broken off. 
The most noteworthy example of this was the hurricane of 1886, 
which first hit the tract in section 27 of township 22 north, range 7 
east, and, traveling in an east-northeast direction, passed out of the 
tract at the eastern edge of sections 20 and 29 of township 22 north, 
range 8 east. The strip swept by the wind was at first half a mile in 
width, but as it advanced it gradually widened out until where it left 
the tract it was nearly a mile and a quarter wide. Throughout this path 
of over 2,500 acres practically every stick of timber was destroyed. 
Owing to the prevalence of fires and the dearth of seed trees there has 
been little reproduction on the area during the intervening eighteen 
