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Last of the Eastern Wilderness: An Article on the Proposed Great Smoky National Park

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  • THE PEDESTRIAN NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN 625 MOUNTAIN LAUREL IN BLOOM ALONG A MOUNTAIN BROOK trip from Boston to the Pacific Coast. The forests of all Europe have only eighty- five species of native trees; the Smoky forest has one hundred and twenty-seven, not counting many shrubs that here assume arborescent form. There is a huckleberry tree that grows twenty to thirty feet high; the mountain laurel and the great rhododendron reach thirty to forty feet, with trunk diameter of twelve to eighteen inches. Going from a neighboring river valley up to "the top o' Smoky," one passes successively through the same iloral zones, in a twenty-mile hike, as he would view in a trip from mid-Georgia to southern Canada. He starts amid sycamores, elms, willows, black gum and sweet gum, holly, hackberry, hornbeam, persimmon, mulberry, oaks, chinquapin, and box-elder. The near-by ridges have been cut over and are now mostly covered with second- growth oaks, hickories, black pine, locust, and dogwood. If the traveler be lucky at the start he may chance upon a fine specimen of that rarest of eastern trees the Cladrastis, or yellowwood. A few miles from the river town he will pass the last settler's cabin. Thenceforth he is in forest primeval, from which nothing has ever been taken except the big poplars that grew near the creek that he is following as his guide in the upward climb. In the first ten miles he has ascended perhaps only a thousand feet, but he is already in a different zone of vegetation from that of the river valley. The creek is bordered with black birch and yellow birch, red ash and green ash, butternut and walnut, beech, holly, magnolia, witch hazel, maples of sundry species, giant hemlocks, and chestnut trees of mighty girth. On the steep encompassing ridges are many kinds of oaks, several species of hickories, red maple, white and black pine, yellow locust, sourwood, dogwood, chestnut, gum, and "sarvis" or service- berry. ' >y ^^^^ *--*,
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).