an emergency appropriation to buy Mount Mitchell (beginning with forty
or so acres) and create a state park. Early in the legislature responded,
and the highest of the Blacks was saved, such as it was.
Now relatively secure from the companies, the mountains’ vast and an-
cient stands of American chestnuts shortly began to blister and die from an
enemy more insidious. Decades earlier, U.S. nurserymen had inadvertently
imported from Asia chestnuts infected with a fungus. Identified in Penn-
sylvania at the beginning of the century, the ‘‘chestnut blight’’ appeared in
piedmont North Carolina at least as early as and reached the Blacks be-
tween about and . By midcentury the American chestnut was effec-
tively gone—as a beauty, as a source of excellent lumber, and as a critical
supplier of mast to forest squirrels, turkeys, deer, and bear. Mitchell and the
Blacks, meanwhile, were reforested, albeit without chestnuts; fire protec-
tion was established; and hunting and fishing were regulated or prohibited.
Later, a long-awaited federal project, the Blue Ridge Parkway, wove near the
Blacks, and a hard-surface spur led to the pinnacle of Mount Mitchell. The
state park remains a popular tourist and sportspeople’s destination.
More recently, though, trees are dying again—this time conifers and de-
ciduous alike. A pest is responsible for much of the affliction of firs, but the
greater blight is toxic air, blown eastward as clouds from factories and elec-
trical power plants. So now tourists driving along the parkway or, farther
north, Skyline Drive near Waynesboro, Virginia, might stop for a view of
a valley but find a sky turned artificially gray. The Park Service has pro-
vided a glass-cased photographical exhibit of air pollution. Farther south,
on Mount Mitchell, views are occluded, too, as they are on down into the
Great Smokies. One must wonder if mountaintops’ metaphoric tradition
will die, too, along with the reality of views from summits.
tMeanwhile the South’s (and the East’s) largest and most popular na-
tional park took shape. This was the Great Smokies, formerly a contigu-
ous expanse of far western North Carolina counties combined with a swath
of Tennessee reaching toward Knoxville. By the end of the s, as tim-
ber cruisers estimated stumpage and outsider companies prepared their
Shays locomotives for the great cut-down, a few locals and more middle-
class visitors were establishing little summer resorts and proclaiming the
Smokies’ salubrious benefits to body and spirit. The cut-out proceeded any-
way, around and beside the resorts, and ironically, excursionists experi-
enced the grand beauties of steep ridges and rushing creeks far below, from
timber-getters’ railcars. Still, as late as , about , people still lived