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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  • 58 SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN REGION. The staple grain produced throughout this region is corn, which yields more heavily than small grain and is clearing °d ofmore 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 years and are then rolled into heaps and burned. Corn or buckwheat is usually grown on these newly 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 gullies. 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 percentile process of age of vegetable matter it contains; but on cultivation and erosion. ° ° ', exposure to the sun and washing rains this organic matter is rapidly dissipated. In this process most of the soil is washed awa}^; 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 are made to replace the fields which from year to year are abandoned because they cease to be productive. A few years of cultivation for fields on these steeper mountain slopes usually brings them to the end of their usefulness for agricultural purposes. This may be followed by a few years of pasturage, and then donment "aTd"come abandonment and ruin. (See Pis. I, XX, and XXI.) cleared' mS^ver 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 mountain 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 readily 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 naturally the first to be cleared, and these are now nearly all in cul-
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).