Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century by Harry Roy Merrens

Author:Harry Roy Merrens [Merrens, Harry Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9780807874431
Google: aOtoDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2018-07-25T00:41:59+00:00

FIG. 44

Evergreen shrub bogs and upland grass-sedge bogs were thus two types of open cover which, taken together, must have occupied a considerable portion of the total area of the Outer Coastal Plain. There were perhaps other kinds in the same region. “Meadows,” for example, once existed in Onslow County. The term was used in colonial land grants for several sites in the county, and at least two localities, Starretts Meadows and Lloyds Meadows, still bore the name early in the twentieth century.29 It is possible, however, that “meadows” was merely an alternative term for either shrub bog or savannah, rather than a name assigned to a quite distinctive type of open ground.

There is much less evidence relating to the colonial vegetation of the Piedmont than there is for the Coastal Plain. The historical record is much less useful, because the western region was settled later and for long was less frequently traversed and described. Furthermore, there are almost no botanical studies that can be used as a basis for reconstructing the details of the floral diversity of the Piedmont in the eighteenth century.

It can at least be said that there was some open land in the Piedmont during the colonial period. During the first half of the nineteenth century there was a tradition to the effect that there had been much open land in the west in the previous century.30 This tradition is substantiated by scattered references in the colonial record, which testify to the existence of open land of several kinds in the western parts of North Carolina31 and which indicate that the tree cover was thin in places.32

The proportion of fire-induced open land in the Piedmont must have remained much less than in the Coastal Plain, simply because burning was less common in the west during the eighteenth century. For at least a generation before colonists moved into the west in large numbers, there were present in the east many settlers who deliberately burned the vegetation for several purposes and set off other fires accidentally; their increasing numbers in the east, as well as the augmented scale of tar production there, were probably making accidental fires an increasingly common occurrence.33 Furthermore, the existence of sand hills, sandy ridges, and extensive peat areas tended to make all fires more destructive in the Coastal Plain. Thus, both deliberate and accidental burning would have been more potent forces in the east than in the west during much of the colonial period.

There is a traditional view of the settler of Anglo-Saxon England as the “grey-haired enemy of the wood.” The tradition is well founded, for the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes settled upon an island that was almost completely covered with forests. But the essentially similar traditional view that developed in the New World, to the effect that the first settlers in North America encountered a stubborn, forested world, stretching from Maine to Alabama, was much less securely founded and has been jettisoned in recent years.

In refuting this notion, great emphasis has

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