A Timeline of Historical Events for KY and TN in the Cumberland Province

by Rob Messick 5/25/07

1873 (March 22) - the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS) was established. Flora was on the list of things to study in the original documents.

1874 - Nathaniel S. Shaler became the first director of KGS, stepping away from being a professor at Harvard University. L. Agassiz was his friend at Harvard.

1879 - the first bulletin of KGS was published, after a few years of initial interruption.

c. 1880 - N. S. Shaler wrote Reports of Progress about his involvement with KGS from 1874-1880 (the period of his directorship).

         Note: searches on World Catalog revealed numerous KGS surveys of timber conditions in various counties in KY, from 1876-1884 and perhaps beyond.

1889 - N.S. Shaler wrote a book titled: Aspects of the Earth. On pages 270-273 there are three etchings or drawings from different artists that depict old forests in Floyd, Harlan, and Bell Counties in Kentucky. Shaler had returned as professor of Geology at Harvard University at that time.

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1901 - Frederick E. Olmstead, with the USDA Bureau of Forestry, took a series of over seven photos in Mixed Mesophytic forest in Scott County, TN (near the town of New River). He was doing work plans for numerous timberland owners in the northeast, southeast, and Ozark sections of the country with the Bureau.

The photos were found at the UNCA Special Collection (Asheville, NC) and at the National Archive in College Park, MD. In combination, this set of photos is numbered as: 6153, 6158, 6161, 6164, 6169, 6170, and 6175. Trees depicted in this series include: tulip poplar (2), Am. basswood, shagbark hickory, Am. beech, black oak, and a photo labeled hardwood slope.

Note: this was the same time Ashe and Ayers were doing their important survey of much of the southern Blue Ridge Province from 1900-1901.

1901 - F. E. Olmstead took a photo in the series mentioned above that wound up on page 37 of a 1913 Tennessee Geological Survey Bulletin written by William W. Ashe. The bulletin was titled: Yellow Poplar in Tennessee (see #6158). In addition one of these photographs wound up on page 20 of a 1915 USDA Bulletin written by Earl H. Frothingham. The bulletin was titled: The Northern Hardwood Forest: Its Composition, Growth, and Management (see #6153).

White oak in Jackson County, KY. This photograph was published on page 309 of a May 1912 article in American Forestry (AFA) titled: Forestry Work at the Southern Commercial Congress.

The caption reads "Large white oak in a hollow below a cliff in Wind Cove, Jackson County, KY". The number (7121) suggests it may have been taken near the time of a 1901 set of photographs by F. E. Olmstead, when he was with the USDA Bureau of Forestry.

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1902 - The Stearns Coal & Lumber Company built [the town of] Stearns, now restored, in 1902. The Big South Fork Scenic Railway operates over historic tracks of the Kentucky and Tennessee Railway. Stearns is in Kentucky, north of the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area.

Source: National Geographic map of Appalachia (2005).

1902 - F. E. Olmstead wrote USDA-BF Bulletin #32 titled: A Working Plan for Forest Lands Near Pine Bluff, Arkansas (US Government Printing Office). This was one year after the Scott County, TN photos were taken. It was in line with numerous timber tract surveys he was doing with the USDA Bureau of Forestry at the time.

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1904 (July 31) - A. B. Patterson, with the USDA Bureau of Forestry, took photo #54972 near Eddyville in Lyon County, KY. This is not in the Cumberland Plateau Province. It is near the Land Between the Lakes. Subject: white oak in Dry Oak forest.

1904 (October 21) - A. B. Patterson, with USDA-BF, took photo #55021 in Lyon County, KY. This is not in the Cumberland Plateau Province. It is near the Land Between the Lakes. Subject: a forest selectively cut for ties in spring 1904. All trees over a 9" limit were removed. It is located on a level slope. "...the remaining stand is in a promising condition" Mr. Patterson wrote in the description.

1904 (November 20) - A. B. Patterson, with USDA-BF, took photo #55037 in Edmonson County, KY. This is not in the Cumberland Plateau Province. It is in the Mammoth Cave area. Subject: a man standing next to a white oak tree. It is described as an oak-poplar-hickory forest. The slope is moderate.

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1904 (November 8) - W. H. Kemffer took a photograph of an area after a high-grading lumber operation had ceased in Menifee County, KY. One of the trees described in the background was a fallen tulip poplar "fully 5 feet in diameter at 40 feet from the stump". The location is given as 1/2 mile above the pumping station, [on the] Salt Fork of Gladie.

1904 (November 11) - W. H. Kemffer took a photograph of a logging operation in the Gladie above Laurel Fork in Menifee County, KY. The photo mainly shows logs (some up to 3 feet in diameter) that were stranded as they floated down the river. Both of the Kemffer photos were found at the UNCA Special Collection (Asheville, NC).

1906 - the Kentucky State Board of Agriculture, Forestry, and Irrigation formed. The board formed mainly to work on forest fire control.

1909 - R. Clifford Hall, with the USFS, did a Progress Report on Forest Conditions in Kentucky with the KY State Board of Forestry. In 1910 he did a report on forest conditions in Tennessee with the Tennessee Geological Survey (TGS). Later William W. Ashe wrote Chestnut in Tennessee (1911), and Yellow Poplar in Tennessee (1913) with TGS. Ashe and R. C. Hall worked together in 1912 to assess the Vanderbilt tract, which later became part of Pisgah National Forest.

c. 1912 ˆ USDA Bureau of Forestry (?) photo #7121. Caption: "Large white oak in a hollow below a cliff in Wind Cove, Jackson County, KY". It was published on page 309 of a May 1912 article in American Forestry (AFA) titled: Forestry Work at the Southern Commercial Congress. The number sequence suggests it may have been taken near the time of the F. E. Olmstead photographs mentioned above.

1912 - Kentucky‚s first state forester, John Earl Barton, was appointed. He resigned in 1919, discouraged at the lack of public support. A few years prior to 1912 R. C. Hall had offered some support from the USFS, a service that had been offered to many other eastern states in that period.

1914 (February) - a letter from Mr. W. A. Leneave of the Southern Timber Company in Crewe, VA was sent to the National Forest Reservation Commission. Mr. Leneave inquired if the recently passed Weeks Act covered the sale of forest lands in Perry and Knott Counties in KY. He was offering 52,000 acres that was divided into two tracts, one in each county. Only a few miles separated the tracts. The tracts were somewhat near two railroads in the area. He estimated there were 350 mbf of merchantable hardwood, "all strictly virgin forests" by his own reckoning. Two seams of coal 5 to 8 feet thick were also reported on these tracts.

William W. Ashe responded that the state of KY had not passed enabling legislation, and it would not be possible for the US Government to consider purchasing the tracts at that time. Permission to start purchasing national forest lands in KY came many years later, in early 1937. According to a 1991 Goshen map, there are no national forest lands in Perry of Knott counties in KY. The lands offered above did not become national forests.

         Source: this letter was found at the National Archive in College Park, MD.

1915 and 1916 - detailed dendrological field work was done by F. W. Haasis in Letcher County, KY. This took place after a logging operation (see below).

1916 - E. Lucy Braun first uses the term Mixed Mesophytic forests in a publication titled: The Physiographic Ecology of the Cincinnati Region (Ohio Biological Survey-OSU). She also used the term in a July 1921 article in Ecology (ESA), covering the same mid-west region.

1919 - Kentucky‚s first state forest reserve, Kentenia, was set aside (3,624 acres). It is located in Harlan County, KY.

1922 - William W. Ashe did a forest assessment in Perry County, KY at a location called "homeplace" on Troublesome Creek. The tract was likely owned by the Mowbray and Robinson Lumber Company of Cincinnati, OH. This company had been in operation in eastern KY since the early 1880s. The tract may have later been associated with a University in the area. A man known by the last name of Cooper commissioned Ashe to do the assessment.  

         Sources:  Purcell, Edward L. Good Neighbor to the Mountains: The Story of the E. O. Robinson Mountain Fund (1922-1987), 1988.

         [see also: Clendening in American Lumberman (1931)]

1922 (March) - W. W. Ashe wrote an important forest typing article in JEMSS titled: Forest Types of the Appalachians and White Mountains. He mentions a type that could be interpreted as Mixed Mesophytic, in the range of types presented. This paper was reviewed by numerous USFS employees. There were plans to continue the process in 1923, but this apparently did not materialize. Just prior to this, in July 1921, E. Lucy Braun wrote an article in Ecology (ESA) that covered forest types in the mid-west.

1923 - Ferdinand W. Haasis, with the USFS Appalachian Forest Experiment Station, wrote an article in the Journal of Forestry (SAF) titled: Significance of a 255-Year Age Class in an Eastern Kentucky Forest. It describes field work and measurements he took in Letcher County, KY in 1915 and 1916. The field work was done before AFES was formally established in Asheville, NC. This article came out only three years after the influential article by A. E. Douglas in Ecology (ESA) titled: Evidence of Climatic Effects in the Annual Rings of Trees. Haasis was a little ahead of his time with regard to a USFS experiment station employee taking an interest in Native American influences, climatic effects, disturbance regimes, tree initiation patterns, and early dendrochronology.

Note: Haasis was one of seven USFS-AFES employees who either did field work in, or made published statements about, the topic of old growth forests. These researchers recognized the need to set aside some of these unique forests for silvicultural and habitat reasons.

1924 - two foresters were hired in the KY State Forestry Division.

1926 (February) - W. W. Ashe and E. Lucy Braun both appear in the Naturalists Guide to the America‚s, which was the first comprehensive compilation of natural areas by state. It was published by the Ecological Society of America, and was put together largely through the efforts of Victor Shelford.

1926 (May) - W. W. Ashe submits an article to Annette Braun, who was with the Society for the Preservation of Wildflowers. Ashe submitted it in place of a requested talk to the society. The talk had been scheduled for the end of 1925. In 1926 E. Lucy Braun, Annette‚s sister, was on the Board of Directors of SPW.

1931 (December 15) - Carl H. Clendening wrote an article in American Lumberman titled: Early Days in the Southern Appalachians. He listed some locations of large trees, such as an 11 foot dbh tulip poplar in eastern KY in holdings of the Ritter-Burns Lumber Company. He also included information about the condition of lumbering operations in parts of the Cumberland Plateau, and the Allegheny Mountain region in West Virginia.

1934 - E. S. Shipp, with the USFS, took some photos near large Kentucky rivers.

Source: UNCA Special Collection ˆ Asheville, NC.

1934 (December) - Robert Sterling Yard, one of the founders of the Wilderness Society, sends a query letter to Leon Kneipp who was with land acquisitions in the USFS. Yard was inquiring about figures for forested lands in the United States. Among the requests, he asked about the known square miles of virgin forests remaining in the US. Kneipp provided a figure of over 98 million acres for the whole country. Kneipp also provided these figures for an arbitrary set of regions in the US.

Source: the National Archive in College Park, MD.

1935 (July) - E. Lucy Braun wrote an article in Ecology (ESA) titled: The Undifferentiated Deciduous Forest Climax and the Association-Segregate. She made the case for the adoption of the term Mixed Mysophytic forest, noting that three other ecologists had used it.

1935 - Emma Lucy Braun served as Vice-president of the Ecological Society of America. This was likely the year she discovered the uncut forest on Lynn Fork in Perry County, KY.

1936 (January 4) - a meeting of the Save Kentucky‚s Primeval Forest League occurred at the Phoenix Hotel in Lexington, KY. E. Lucy Braun and her sister had found an uncut primary forest on Lynn Fork in Perry County that was threatened with logging. "Eminent biologists" likely on committees of the Ecological Society of America (see below) were involved. Support was gathered from the Governor of KY, and other prominent citizens of the state.

1936 (April) - news of E. Lucy Braun‚s find of an uncut deciduous forest on Lynn Fork in Perry County, KY was listed in the April 1936 issue of Ecology (ESA). The site was claimed to be at a lower elevation than any of the national parks in the Appalachian Mountains. The ESA Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions (founded in 1917) was committed to establishing National Monuments in the mid-1930s. The forest on Lynn Fork was being considered for this designation. A committee of four people, including Stanley Cane, was assigned to examine the area and offer recommendations to the Ecological Society of America.

Note: despite political, scientific, and activist support SKPFL was not able to save the forests on this private tract. It was lost sometime after 1937.

1937 (February 23) - the Cumberland National Forest was established. On April 11, 1966 the name changed to the Daniel Boone, NF. Work toward the establishment of this national forest likely occurred in 1936.  Source: R. C. Davis 1983.

1937 (April) - another ESA committee, known as the Committee for the Study of Plant and Animal Communities, had formed in 1931. They prepared a map of known national parks and reserves in North America. By 1937 the committee proposed new areas that could be set aside by the federal government as Primeval National Monuments. Lynn Fork in Perry County, KY was on a list of eight places being considered for this designation, or for recommendations to that effect.

1937 (June) - C. A. Abell, with the USFS-AFES, took photo #34952 in the Red River Gorge. It was taken from Sky Bridge. Pine forest is visible above a limestone bluff, and deciduous forests are seen below the bluff. The forests look intact.

1938 (October) - E. Lucy Braun wrote an article in Ecology (ESA) titled: Deciduous Forest Climaxes. She again questions the inability of some ecologists to adopt the idea of including Mixed Mesophytic as a forest type. Many, such as Clements, were clinging to an oversimplified three-fold concept for deciduous forest typing. She references her first use of the term in 1916 (see above).

1950 - E. Lucy Braun was president of the Ecological Society of America, the same year her book Deciduous Forest of the Eastern North America came out.

Rob Messick 5/25/07