Timber

As settlers pushed into Western North Carolina, they found almost unbroken forest except on some of the mountain tops characterized as “balds,” where there was only grass or shrubbery. Naturalists have estimated that in the mountains of North Carolina were as many as one hundred kinds of trees. In the highest forests, above four thousand feet in altitude, were black spruce and balsam. The oaks predominated in altitudes up to twenty-five hundred feet, and with them were mixed the shortleaf pine, the hickory, the black gum, and the red maple. Between twenty-five hundred and thirty-five hundred feet the oaks decreased