A Good Place Gets Even Better:
Acquisitions at White Pines Natural Area

by Lynn Padgett
from TLC News, January 1996)

When it comes to knowing where we are, forget maps, compass bearings, and satellite location systems. We know a place not by any measurement of its location in space but by its location in our senses. When we really know a place, the primitive pathways in our brains have recorded its smell, our fingernails have collected its dirt, our ears have heard its heartbeat.

TLC doesn't buy land to accumulate property but to make possible long-term relationships between people and places. TLC sites become friends we can visit at all seasons to learn their smells and their stories. The TLC property probably best known to its friends is the 258-acre White Pines Natural Area in Chatham County at the confluence of the Rocky and Deep rivers. In November and December, TLC added two jewels to this crown property: a five-acre tract on the Rocky River purchased from Murphy ("Bud") and Nellie Holder of Pittsboro and a ten-acre tract on the Deep River purchased from Martha and Robert Cline of Sanford. Together these two acquisitions make a great place even better.

The Holder tract at the northwest corner of TLC's property adds almost 500 feet of frontage on the Rocky River. From its plateau, probably the highest point in the Natural Area, a winter vista of wooded ridges falls away across the river. Here a steep bluff, densely covered with mountain laurel and rhododendron, plummets 150 feet to mossy boulders and rock outcroppings. Half buried in sand, mussel shells gather between boulders. Resurrection ferns cling to trees precariously reaching out over the river.

With the generous help of Martha Cline, TLC has also completed its border along the Deep River. Mrs. Cline, who bought land at White Pines because of its great beauty, just sold her ten acres to TLC at far below its appraised value. This land is one of the most botanically diverse sites in White Pines, with groves of both white pine and longleaf pine and a very rich wetlands. In addition, TLC's new "blue" foot trail crosses this tract as it winds along the Deep River.

A visit to the White Pines Natural Area connects us with the story of the Piedmont for the last ten thousand years. A remnant population of white pines, some of them more than 100 years old, has persisted here, farther east than any other natural stand of white pine, since the end of the last ice age. The microclimate that helps these trees survive supports other species more common to the mountains than the piedmont: witch alder, mountain liverleaf, purple laurel, and two species of mycorrhizal mushrooms.

Winter is the best season to see the contours of this heavily wooded area. Abandoned fields and pastures have become oak-hickory forests. A collapsing log barn and brick chimney mark an old home site. A rusted cable at the base of the bluff is all that remains of a footbridge built in 1922 by Philip Lee for his children as their shortcut to school. Bright orange, a marbled orb spider stalks across an eroding road. Turtles line up on logs to gather the last sunshine of the short day.

It all looks very natural. But as with most Piedmont sites, the configuration we see today is the result of human interaction with the environment. Millions of feet of lumber were shipped from the forests of Harnett and Chatham counties. "Rosin," turpentine, and tar went downstream with cotton and corn. Discovery of coal fields at Egypt and Farmersville just up the Deep River from TLC's land led to 40 years of effort beginning in 1828 to establish a series of locks and dams to make the Deep and Cape Fear rivers navigable from Fayetteville to Carbonton.

Unrealistic estimates of the amount of coal and iron, shortages of labor and capital, defective work, inadequate revenue, and frequent, destructive floods delayed and eventually defeated the navigation project. In 1859, however, a 100-foot steamer passed this site on its way to the Gulf. The long ditch along the river at the edge of the Cline property may be a remnant of the navigation project. In 1853, the anticipated benefits of providing reliable transportation to this area were summarized in the company's annual report:
“Who can fully estimate the immense benefits that will flow from this work when done! developing as it will those rich treasures so profusely scattered by the hand of a beneficent God in the bosom of the earth in that section of the state directly connected with our improvement.”**

As TLC expands its stewardship acreage in the White Pines Natural Area, we define these words in a different way. The “rich treasures” in which the members of TLC rejoice are not iron for a national forge or the “black diamond” of coal. Our treasures are the gold of hickory leaves, the silver of beech trunks, the emerald of moss, the pearl of mushroom, and the sapphire of a winter sky reflected in the Deep River.

**Report of the president and directors to the stockholders, July 21, 1853. Quoted in The Story of the Cape Fear and Deep River Navigation Company 1849-1873, Wade H. Hadley, Jr., The Chatham County Historical Society, 1980, p. 27.

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