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Report of the Secretary of Agriculture in relation to the forests, rivers, and mountains of the southern Appalachian region

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  • 26 SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN REGION. mately 2 feet in 10), while 21 per cent (see PI. XII) of it has been cleared. In this region land with slopes exceeding this can not be successfully cultivated for any considerable time, because i^s surface is rapidly washed into the rivers below by the heavy rains, and the same agency rapidly leaches out and carries to the sea its more soluble and fertile ingredients. The valley lands have already been largely cleared, and the farmers are now following up the mountain slopes. In many cases their cleared patches have well nigh reached the mountain summits. This process is going on with greater rapidity, because each short-lived hillside field must soon be abandoned. The underbrush is destroyed, the trees are girdled, and for one, two, or three years such a field is planted in corn, then a year in grain, then one or two years in grass; then the grass gives place to weeds, and the weeds to gullies. (See Pis. XX and XXI.) mOT?ntahitlsIop0e" Such a field has usually passed through its cycle in five benefit's--"pernm-to *en years and another must be cleared to take its place. rui'ting'iiiurieT ^ forest which is the growth of several centuries perishes in less than a decade; a soil which is the accumulation of a thousand years has been cleared, cultivated, abandoned, and is on the downward road to the sea within less than a decade. Such is the brief life history of many thousands of small mountain fields in this Southern Appalachian region. But even the native farmer is beginning to realize that the clearing of these mountain slopes is producing floods that wash away the valley farms, and that the time must come when he will have successively cleared and destroyed all his available mountain land. (See PI. XXXIV). some serious Fortunately the intelligence of the country is awaken- results from this i -i 1 forest clearing, mg to other and larger results that are following this policy. The soil thus removed may stop long enough on its way to the sea to silt up the streams as they cross the lowlands or may fill up the harbors as the streams reach the coast. Every acre of mountain slope thus cleared is a step in the more rapid destruction of the forests, of the soils, of the rivers, and of the "eternal mountains" themselves— the destruction of conditions which the combined wealth, intelligence, and time of man can not restore in a region which now possesses infinite possibilities for the benefit of the whole nation.
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