Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0623-8896
Date Available
5-15-2027
Year of Publication
2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
History
Faculty
Kathryn Newfont
Faculty
Hilary Jones
Abstract
This dissertation is about Appalachian old-growth forests and the human communities who have protected them. Dynamic and diverse, today’s rare old-growth Appalachian forests were once part of an extensive landscape-level mosaic of forests, which had been shaped by Indigenous peoples for millennia. The forests draping the mountains under Indigenous stewardship likely would have looked much like what we now call “old-growth forests.” Indigenous worldviews guided human-forest relationships toward regeneration through reciprocity, and with future generations in mind. When colonialism and settler colonialism dispossessed Indigenous peoples from the Appalachian forests, the forests became diminished by Western thought that separated humans from the natural world and largely considered forests as commodities or hindrances to improving the land for agriculture. Increased land clearings, livestock grazing, and fire use further tattered the swathes of abundant “old-growth” forests.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these abundant yet tattered swathes of old-growth forests became further reduced when a massive wave of timber harvests enabled by railroad industrialization denuded the Appalachians. While most of the mountain cover was cut over, remnants of old-growth forests remain in the Central and Southern Appalachians. I study three old-growth forest areas: Blanton Forest in eastern Kentucky and Grassy Mountain and Cooper Creek, both in north Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest. How were they spared from industrial cutting? How did they come to be protected, if so? What lessons can we draw from their histories?
The reasons these old-growth forests were spared from the railroad harvests are unclear. Primary sources indicate a set of reasons including inaccessibility and the costs of extraction exceeding the forest area’s commercial value. Though these forest remnants survived the industrial era, they continued to be vulnerable to, and even targeted for, logging by forest scientists who viewed old growth as wasteful and overmature. Deforestation increased with World War II and in its aftermath. Waves of economic-driven environmental violences against Appalachian forests historically benefitted the few, especially entities outside the region.
Defenders emerged to protect the Appalachian Mountains, including their old ecosystems, from extraction. This dissertation explores three old-growth forest defense campaigns in which people valued forests beyond their economic worth as timber resources. The first case study begins in 1959 with ecologist Charles Wharton’s campaign to protect Cooper Creek in north Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest from a United States Forest Service (USFS) timber harvest. Wharton led a multiprong campaign to protect the “primeval” forest, gaining the support of ecologists, Georgia citizens, and environmental and civic organizations. He leveraged the media to spread awareness, and his campaign reached Georgia politicians who held powerful positions over the USFS. Despite USFS reluctance, the campaign was mostly successful, resulting in the Cooper Creek Scenic Area designation in 1960.
The second case explores the 1990s Blanton Forest campaign to protect over 2,000 acres of old-growth forest in eastern Kentucky. The Blanton Forest campaign is a story of family-based stewardship, environmentally conscious public and private organizations, and grassroots support set in Harlan County, a place known for coal mining and labor activism. Blanton Forest represents a successful forest protection campaign with an environmental ethos that embraced both scientific and experiential knowledge of a particular place. Local community members and outsiders alike valued the old age, biodiversity, and beauty of Blanton Forest.
The final case returns to the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia to examine environmental activism in the 1980s through the early 2000s. Activists resisted USFS efforts to deny the existence of remaining old-growth forests by using observational science methods to identify old growth, and learning the political, legal, and administrative landscapes of USFS forest planning. They identified almost 2,000 acres on Grassy Mountain and pushed the USFS to recognize and provide protections for old-growth forest areas.
Linking these campaigns is the analytical concept of “hope spots,” coined by marine oceanographer Sylvia Earle to describe biodiverse marine areas that are necessary for the health of the ocean, and thus, the planet. In the terrestrial version, old-growth forest hope spots are biodiverse regenerative refuges with healing capacity, vital to forest ecosystems.
Together, the case studies extend and enrich the narrative of old-growth forest defense efforts in the Appalachians. While Blanton Forest received permanent protection by the Kentucky state government, Cooper Creek and Grassy Mountain are temporarily protected within the USFS’s Land and Resource Management Plan for the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests. They are among the hope spots that remain vulnerable to logging. The defense of ecosystem hope spots provides lessons for our complex, interconnected ecological, social, and climate crises.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.167
Funding Information
Support provided by the University of Kentucky History Department's Charles P. Roland Fellowship (2024), Mary Wilma Hargreaves Memorial Fellowship (2023), and Dorothy Leathers and George Herring Fellowship (2022). Support was also provided by the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center's James S. Brown Graduate Student Award for Research on Appalachia (2021) and the Eller & Billings Student Research Award (2018).
Recommended Citation
Kiser, Emma, "PROTECTING ECOSYSTEM HOPE SPOTS: CASE STUDIES IN APPALACHIAN OLD-GROWTH FOREST DEFENSE" (2025). Theses and Dissertations--History. 92.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_etds/92
