Heritage/History Lifestyle

History Feature: Step Back in Time at Bent Creek

History Feature: Bent Creek

Bent Creek

By John Ross

Bent Creek’s thin stream flows under Brevard Road by the entrance to the North Carolina Arboretum. Nobody pays it much mind today except, maybe, those who launch kayaks or paddleboards where it joins the French Broad. It’s too shallow for swimming and too small to fish. Yet, 175 years ago the waters of this little creek were turning wheels of three gristmills and a sawmill.

Rising north of a gap on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Bent Creek drains a watershed of a little more than 6,000 acres. It draws its name from a sharp horseshoe curve behind the Arboretum’s Education Center.

When Bent Creek was settled, the forest looked quite different from today. Although of varying heights, the canopy of oaks, poplar and chestnut was almost solid. Rhododendron slicks and laurel hells were few. Brush and vines were scant.

About 1795, around the time John Burton was laying off the lots that would become Asheville, early settlers began building houses where Boyd, Ledford and Wolf branches joined Bent Creek. Some were rude log cabins with hides, at first, covering windows and doors. Others, two-story and of frame, might have been considered “grand” by their neighbors.

History Feature: Bent Creek

Construction

Living harmoniously nearby were about 200 Cherokee. Most of their homes were likely of traditional style made of posts and woven saplings bent over and sheathed with bark and daubed with mud. They lived peaceably in the watershed until the late 1830s. Then, most quietly melted deep into the Great Smokies to escape eviction onto what would become the Trail of Tears.

James Case might be considered Bent Creek’s first industrialist. He built a dam and dug a mill race in 1808 to turn his grist and saw mills and, perhaps, pump the bellows of his blacksmith shop. Rather than a toothed rotating steel disk, Case’s saw resembled a two-man crosscut that cycled up and down driven by an eccentric cam. With it he could produce 1,000 to 3,000 board feet of lumber per day. His mill operated into the early 1900s. By that time, heavy logging had changed the landscape to one of homes, businesses and cultivated and pastured areas.

George W. Vanderbilt began purchasing tracts in the watershed around that time. Following his death in 1914, his widow Edith sold about two-thirds of his 125,000-acre estate to the U.S. Forest Service. It became the core of Pisgah National Forest, and included was the Bent Creek drainage.
Shortly thereafter, in 1925, the Forest Service established the Bent Creek Experimental Forest with an entomology research station on the tract.

Efforts were focused on rehabilitating the land that had been damaged by farming and logging practices. Many of the Forest’s yellow shingle buildings date from that era. As the oldest experimental fo

rest in the East, Bent Creek is the site of extensive studies of regrowth of hardwoods, including the American chestnut, and of the genesis and control of pests like the emerald ash borer.

Surrounded by the forest, Lake Powhatan is a delightful place for a summer swim. While walking trails in the adjacent recreation area, imagine settlers and Cherokee living nearby. Except during the winter, motorists can drive the length of the watershed on Forest Service Road 479, which runs from the Blue Ridge Parkway down through the forest. And while in that neck of the woods this month, visit the North Carolina Arboretum and stroll its spectacular gardens of flowering shrubs.

For more information about the Bent Creek Experimental Forest and the Southern Research Station, visit srs.fs.usda.gov, and find the North Carolina Arboretum at NCArboretum.org.

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