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A Brief History of Grandfather Mountain

By Scott Nicholson
It’s breaking news that only took a billion years to develop.

Grandfather Mountain was created about 730 million years ago when two of the Earth’s plates collided, but

some of the material is even older than that.

A 1962 U.S. Geological Survey reported some of the rock formations date back 1.1 billion years.

The original Cherokee name for the mountain was “Tanawha,” meaning “a fabulous hawk or eagle.”

According to the Grandfather Mountain park’s official history, the mountain was named “Grandfather” by pioneers who recognized the face of an old man in one of the cliffs.

French botanist Andre Michaux climbed Grandfather in August 1794 and made the first scientific observations of the habitat. Harvard botanist Asa Gray came to Grandfather in 1841 and discovered Gray’s Lily, a rare flower that blooms in high grassy areas on the mountain in June and July.

In the early 1900s, Samuel T. Kelsey bought options on 16,000 acres that included Grandfather, Sugar and Flattop Mountains. Most of the tracts that encompass Grandfather Mountain were purchased from William Waighstill Lenoir. The MacRae family eventually acquired controlling interest in the land-development project under the title Linville Improvement Company.

After the dissolution of the succeeding company in 1952, Hugh MacRae Morton became the sole owner of Grandfather Mountain. He widened the mountain’s access road to two lanes and extended it to the summit, where he built the world-famous Mile High Swinging Bridge. He brought bears to the mountain in 1968, establishing one of the signature images of the tourist attraction.

In 1989, Grandfather Mountain worked with the North Carolina chapter of the Nature Conservancy to preserve 1,460 acres of the mountain’s wilderness back country and continues to assist with management of the mountain and its resources.

In 1992, Grandfather was selected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for recognition as a member of the international network of Biosphere Reserves.

When Morton died in June 2006, his heirs took over operation of the mountain and sought to build on his environmental vision. That includes preserving the mountain’s role in research and biological studies.

“It’s got one of the highest biodiversities in the region because of the assortment of biological communities there,” said Gary Walker, a biology professor at Appalachian State University, singling out rock outcrops along the Rough Ridge Trail as particularly diverse.

“Rock outcrops generally harbor a lot of rare species,” he said, with Heller Blazing Star one of the most notable floral species. The mountain has some glacial-relic communities, which is listed as the second-rarest type of biological community in the world.

“When the climate warmed, some species repopulated north, but some were isolated in the high elevations of the Appalachians,” Walker said, especially in spruce forests at high elevations and hardwood forests at lower elevations.

He said deforestation by humans, pressures from ozone and acid deposition and the infestation of insect pests have threatened the mountains, and preserving acreage would help those habitats maintain themselves.
Walker likened a drive along a nearby stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway to a natural-sightseeing trip from the South to Canadian forests and seeing a lot of different forest communities. The combined tracts of national park, state area and conservation parcels will result in a large habitat that should remove most of the pressures that could lead to dramatic change.

That protection will help preserve the long-term diversity of the habitat, Walker said, though it won’t be immune to atmospheric changes and air pollution. “The spruce-fir forests of the Grandfather Mountains are kind of the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for changing global conditions,” Walker said, noting they are the first to show stress from changing conditions.

He said a lot of genetic diversity was indigenous to Grandfather Mountain and its surrounding slopes, such as the saw whet owl, which has higher levels of genetic diversity than related species farther north. “They’ve been around longer,” Walker said, adding that the local bird populations had probably been through several glacial retreats and had stored more genetic diversity and information while its northern counterparts emerged from the last glacial retreat 10,000 years ago. “We’ve seen that in a number of species now,” Walker said.

Merrill Lynch, who heads the Nature Conservancy office in Boone, said, “We consider Grandfather Mountain an ecological site of global significance. It provides habitat for more globally rare species than any mountain east of the Rockies. It’s one of the most important sites not only in the United States but worldwide.”

Miles Tager, author of “Grandfather Mountain: A Profile,” described the mountain as a jewel in the Earth’s crown. In his preface, he wrote: “Grandfather Mountain is the fractal-like heart of the Appalachian mosaic, a perfect miniature of the whole intricate pattern; and a crown jewel of one of the richest biomes on the planet. The abundance and variety of life here have from the beginning attracted considerable human attention...

“Grandfather’s great cliffs, rivers and forests were places of extraordinary mythic power and practical value alike, two aspects, like the twin lenses of binoculars, indistinguishable in the Native American view. The mountain yielded spirits, totems, legends and lore; crystal, stone, fiber, wood, bark, game, fish, herbs and medicine.”

A billion years in the making, a majority of the mountain became the property of human government with Monday’s purchase, though the natural law will still rule.