MOUNTAIN HOME – Two hundred years ago, before Baxter County became home to early settlers, the primary habitat there was prairie.
“Most people are surprised to hear that,” said Phil Hyatt of Mountain Home.
Hyatt, 57, has been interested in the environment around him since he started keeping records of birds as a boy growing up in Yellville. Today he has a bachelor’s degree in zoology and a master’s in botany. He wrote his master’s thesis on the vascular flora of Baxter County and is a former botanist for the Sylamore District of the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest. A selfdescribed vegetation ecologist, Hyatt is passionate about the ecological history of the area and the preservation of its natural habitats.
In his thesis, Hyatt quoted Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who published the first written history of the geography and vegetation of Arkansas after he explored the area in 1818, and Frances Shiras McClelland, who wrote The History of Baxter County in 1939.
Schoolcraft wrote, “the difficulties attending our progress down the valley induced us to strike out into the open prairie, where traveling was free, unimpeded by shrubbery or vines. Nothing but illimitable fields of grass, with clumps of trees here or there, met the eye.”
McClelland supported that observation in her book.
“The country was almost without timber,” she wrote. “Old settlers say that for every 1,000 trees we see now, they saw only one. … The barren or prairie grasses grew seven to ten feet high.”
Hyatt documents that “Mountain Home was originally called Rapp’s Barrens, ‘barrens’ being a local name for the prairie.”
How can an area referred to as mountainous be considered prairie?
The Ozarks were created by erosion, not folding, Hyatt says. A former seabed, the area was once a flat plain. That’s why many high points in the area have flat tops, or mesas. Erosion carved the deep valleys of the Ozarks.
In contrast, mountains such as the Appalachians were created when the earth folded, or pushed up into a ridge.
Stanley Pitchford, 67, of Mountain Home remembers his great-grandfather, a schoolteacher in the 1860s, telling stories of bluestem grass in the pastures “so tall it touched the horses’ bellies.”
Schoolcraft is said to have written something similar that Hyatt hasn’t been able to substantiate.
“When I was a boy,” Pitchford said, “there was a big red oak here and there. Otherwise it was open range.”
The Pitchfords let their hogs and cattle roam free in the spring and rounded them up in the fall.
“Fences were for keeping other people’s animals out of your garden,” Pitchford said. “Fences weren’t on property lines like people today think.”
Hyatt said Pitchford’s pasture is similar to the prairie of the past, with scattered trees and tall grass.
Other longtime Mountain Home residents remember the prairie, too.
“I remember walking up Wallace Knob when I was young, and there was cedar scrub and that’s all,” said Judi Sharp, Mc-Clelland’s niece. “That was in the ’50s. In the forest around my house now, the trees are all young, maybe 50 or 60 years old. There are very few old trees left. They’re very special when you find them.”
Marty White of the Forestry Commission at Midway remembers his father, George White, talking about the prairie.
“My dad said when he was a boy it was all big timber and tall grass. No underbrush.”
Schoolcraft documented that the banks of the area’s rivers were lined with tall pines and a “vigorous forest of trees.” Logging in the late 19th century affected the area’s environment tremendously in woodland areas, but in the uplands, the most important factor was fire.
Hyatt’s documentation from the 11th Central Hardwood Forest Conference in 1997 included a detailed investigation by Sean Jenkins, Richard Guyette and Alan Rebertus into the history of fire in the Ozarks.
Fires caused by lightning are rare in the region. Fire scars in old trees indicate that frequent burning began in 1804, which coincides with the migration of Cherokees to the area between 1785 and 1828.
The Cherokees began to leave the area in accordance with the treaty of 1828, and documentation shows a reduction in fire scars after that.
But early settlers continued burning fields to control ticks and underbrush, according to Hyatt and White.
During the 1930s, the Arkansas Forestry Commission was established in part to protect all state land from wildfires. Since then, hardwood trees and cedars have filled in the once-open areas.
So is it woodland or prairie that is more natural to Baxter County?
“This is the debate going on with ecologists,” Hyatt said. “We just don’t have the data on lightning strikes. We can safely say that every 50 years or so things dried out and fires went uncontrolled.”
White is concerned about the possibility of wildfires fueled by the drying timber felled earlier this year in ice storms.
“Fire is important in the preservation of native species,” Hyatt said. “Yellow coneflower grows in only six places in Arkansas now. Three of those places are in Baxter County.”
Wildflowers are seen often along roadsides because mowing mimics fire, Hyatt said, creating an environment that facilitates seed sprouting.
“Mountain Home is rather rapidly becoming an urbanized area,” Hyatt said, adding that burning is no longer practical with so many people around. “We need to preserve the habitat we still have. We should consider 1,000-acre parks, think about future highways now and buy the land. What do we want Mountain Home to look like 40 to 50 years from now?”
