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What is the vanished grove of the Altamaha?

By Chelsie Vandaveer

March 14, 2002

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John Bartram was a self-educated man and a friend of Benjamin Franklin. John made sure his son, William had an excellent education. In 1765, two remarkable things happened to John; he was awarded the title of Royal Botanist by King George III, and he and William were exploring the Altamaha River in southeast Georgia. Father and son discovered a small grove of trees which had never been seen by the botanical world.

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William returned to the grove a few years later and collected seeds to take back to the family garden. They named the tree Franklinia alatamaha to honor Franklin and the location of the only known grove. The Bartrams put the trees into cultivation. John Bartram died in 1777, but his granddaughter, Ann, and her husband, Robert Carr, took the family farm and turned it into a commercial nursery.

In 1783, Ann and Robert published the first nursery catalog in the U.S. It offered stock from that singular grove on the banks of the Altamaha. Bartram's was the only nursery to have this showy tree--fragrant autumn flowers, white petaled with a heap of yellow stamens, the foliage turning orange-red often before the tree finished flowering.

The cotton industry of the 1700s and 1800s abused the land. Cotton was repeatedly planted on the same land until the minerals were depleted, the land eroded, and a disease called root rot, Phytophthora cinnamomi, made it impossible to grow anything. The land stood abandoned while more forests fell to abuse.

No one ever collected seeds after William; no one thought that this little grove would vanish. And no one knows what happened. The tree is susceptible to root rot, but maybe someone just chopped them down. In 1803, the grove was seen for the last time.

Scattered across North America and Europe are 2042 known Franklinia all descended from the seeds collected by William Bartram.

Historic Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia has a website. To visit, click on the link:

http://www.bartramsgarden.org/franklinia/

George Washington (1732-99) at Bartram's Garden, 1774 Giclee Print
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In 1775, William Bartram was hiking across western North Carolina. He wrote in his journal "...I began again to ascend the Jore Mountains, which I at length accomplished, and rested on the most elevated peak; from whence I beheld with rapture and astonishment a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world of mountains piled upon mountains."

Two hundred and two years later, eleven people formed a society to rediscover and build the trail William Bartram walked when he explored these North Carolina mountains. The trail has seven sections, one can hike the entire 80 miles or any one of the sections; mountain bikers can pedal a 14 mile bike trail or canoeists can float 9 miles of the Little Tennessee River in section 3. The trail (section 1) connects to Bartram's trail in Georgia. The trail runs to the Cheoah Mountains north of Robbinsville.

Two hundred members of the North Carolina Bartram's Trail Society keep this trail well marked and in good repair. To learn more about this society, to join, to help maintain the trail, or to spend your vacation seeing the wilds William Bartram saw, click on the link:

http://ncbartramtrail.org/

Maps of the trail can be ordered at http://ncbartramtrail.org/?page_id=20

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