W S Hooks, Archives of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park 
J S Cooverl, Mississippi Department of Archives and History 
Once we establish this trajectory of 
change, we can use it as a guide to 
predicting and controlling future 
trends. 
The landscapes of the southeastern 
United States, extending westward 
from Delaware to Arkansas and south- 
ward to Louisiana and Florida, have 
undergone major modification in the 
past 250 years. And although other 
regions differ with respect to the de- 
tails of land use, the transformations 
in this region exemplify the overall 
trends in carbon storage in the tem- 
perate zone. 
In pre-Columbian times, the South- 
east was covered with a diverse mosaic 
of forest communities, interspersed 
with some prairielike openings created 
by Indian burning and by locally dry 
or nutrient-poor soils. Using an early 
inventory of forest resources prepared 
in 1883 by botanist C. S. Sargent, 
director of the Arnold Arboretum at 
Harvard University, we can derive 
average biomass and carbon values 
for the original forests remaining in 
the 1880s. These uncut forests, rep- 
resentative of presettlement condi- 
tions, generally attained a greater bio- 
mass than many commercial forests 
reach today, in part because present- 
day exploitation of marketable timber 
is continual and in part because cer- 
tain dominant forest types, and even 
species, no longer exist. 
If we envision the presettlement 
vegetation of the Southeast as being 
in a state of equilibrium with natural 
disturbances such as fires and wind- 
throws, we can use the period from 
a.d. 1 700 to 1 750 as a beginning point 
for considering changes in vegetation. 
With the coming of European settlers, 
forests east of the Mississippi River 
were increasingly opened up for cul- 
tivation and exploited for building ma- 
terials and fuel. Fragmentation of the 
forests closely followed patterns of set- 
tlement in the 1700s. By 1790, most 
of the Atlantic seaboard was exten- 
sively settled, particularly the lowland 
tidewater regions of Virginia and the 
Carolinas. Portions of the lower Mis- 
sissippi Valley were also settled early, 
with the wide levees of the Red and 
Mississippi rivers cleared first for the 
production of sugar cane. Settlement 
of the interior of the Southeast pro- 
ceeded along valleys between the Ap- 
palachian and Cumberland moun- 
tains, until the discovery of gaps in 
the Cumberlands permitted settlers to 
transport their families and belongings 
over the mountains. The frontier re- 
ceded rapidly as the population grew, 
with settlements reaching western 
Louisiana and Arkansas by 1840. 
The Industrial Revolution and ac- 
companying mechanization acceler- 
ated the pace of destruction of the 
southeastern forests. Before the end 
of the eighteenth century, William 
Dunbar, a plantation owner in the Tu- 
nica Hills of Mississippi and Louisi- 
ana, combined the use of the cotton 
gin, introduced in 1793, and the prin- 
ciple of contour farming. The western 
Florida parishes of southeastern Lou- 
isiana quickly became a major cotton- 
producing area. In the early 1800s, 
railroad lines were established to con- 
nect plantations along tributaries to 
the Mississippi River, and the export 
of cotton increased. By the 1850s, the 
stretch of fertile hills from Natchez, 
>5 
34 
