Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

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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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  • SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN REGION. 27 In the cool climate of New England the native grasses hotdau>e°soiinon the mountain form a dense sod which holds the hillside surfaces in place, )J0cpes so that even where the forests have been removed there is little erosion. In the Southern Appalachians, however, neither the grass, the legumes, nor the other forage plants have been able to prevent this land erosion, and their only safeguard for the future is the protection of the forests. Hundreds of these steep mountain fields where selected grasses were sown have been observed during the past few years, and the results, as indicating a means of permanently holding these soils, have been generally unsatisfactory. (See PI. XXII.) This washing away of the cleared mountain fields does mountain lands, not always manifest itself in the formation of deep gullies. The majority of these fields have slopes so steep that the water in its downward course can not always move laterally to a sufficient degree for its concentration and the washing out of such gullies. Each drop of rain does its own work in battering and loosening the surface; and as it carries downward the particles of soil it has captured it is joined by only its closer neighbors. Hence frequently after a heavy rain the surface of such a field looks as though it might have been harrowed or even raked downward rather than plowed in larger furrows. From one of these cleared fields more soil is sometimes removed by a single heavy rain than during the preceding centuries while it was densely forest covered. Put while the rains are removing the soils of the cleared 0*1v^y1ands!> mountain slopes the floods are removing the soils of the valley farms. This is notably the case in the valleys, where the bordering forests have been cleared to the largest extent. Year by year the channels of the streams are widening and encroaching upon the adjacent farms, and as the magnitude of the floods increases, these mountain streams, transformed into swollen torrents, leave their course and plow new channels across the fields. During the floods of the present year thousands of acres of the most productive valley lands in this mountain region have been damaged or destroyed by one or both of these processes. (See Pis. XXIII and'XXIV.) It is, then, exactly true that the making of farms on mountain slopes is destroying the farms in the valleys, and that unless stopped by some external influence this process will proceed more rapidly as the population of the
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).