58 



SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN REGION. 



The staple grain produced throughout this region is 

 corn, which yields more heavily than small grain and is 

 cluing ""^ °^more easily managed on the steep slopes. On clearing 

 the land for cultivation the standing' trees are girdled to 

 kill them, so that neither their shade nor their growing 

 roots will injure the crops. Some of the trees thus killed 

 are used for fencing and fuel, but the greater number of 

 them fall in a few j^ears and are then rolled into heaps 

 and burned. Corn or buckwheat is usually gi'own on 

 these newl}' cleared fields, between the girdled trees during 

 the first season (see PI. XLIX.) Following this corn may 

 be planted one or two years more; then small grain, either 

 wheat, rye, or oats, for one or two years; then grass for 

 a few years; then follow worthless weeds, and then the gul- 

 lies. When first cleared most of this mountain-side land is 

 covered with a layer of humus several inches thick, and the 

 soil below is black and porous, owing to the large percent- 

 The process of age of vegetable matter it contains; but on cultivation and 



erosion. ° i i • • i 



exposure to the sun and washing rams this organic matter 

 is rapidly dissipated. In this process most of the soil is 

 washed away; the remainder shrinks and consolidates, 

 thus losing much of its power to absorb water rapidly, and 

 loses its fertility by the continued eroding and dissolving 

 action of the rains. 



Hence these cleared mountain lands have a short-lived 

 usefulness, and new clearings ai'e made to replace the fields 

 which from 3'ear to 3^ear are abandoned because they cease 

 to be productive. A few 5^ears of cultivation for fields on 

 these steeper mountain slopes usuall}' brings them to the 

 end of their usefulness for agricultural purposes. This 

 ma}'' be followed by a few 3'ears of pasturage, and then 

 donment tTd ^^^^^ abandonment and ruin. (See Pis. I, XX, and XXI.) 

 cleared^ moun'^ Ovcr the eroded foothills, along the eastern base of the 

 tain slopes. Blue Ridge and western base of the Unakas, young pines 

 may slowly cover again the eroded surface of the moun- 

 tain slope, but over the more elevated portion of the 

 Appalachian Mountain region the erosion, whether it be 

 in gullies, visible for miles, or in the more common form 

 in which the whole surface moves downward, is so rapid 

 that the hard-wood forests, slower to reproduce, do not 

 readil}^ regain their footing, and hence the work of land 

 destruction continues. 



The limited alluvial or bottom lands in this region being 

 the most productive and easiest cultivated, were natui'ally 

 the first to be cleared, and these are now nearly all in cul- 



