Maddron Bald: Old Growth and the CCC Legacy
Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee
The Maddron Bald Trail climbs seven miles from the valley floor near Cosby to a five-thousand-two-hundred-foot heath bald, one of those open, windswept mountain summits covered in laurel and blueberry rather than trees. Along the way, about three miles in, it passes through Albright Grove, which is something genuinely rare: an old-growth cove hardwood forest that survived the logging era intact.
Cove hardwood forest is one of the most diverse plant communities in eastern North America, and the Smokies contain more of it than anywhere else. But most of what you walk through in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is second-growth, forest that was clear-cut during the logging boom of the early twentieth century and has been growing back ever since. Albright Grove was never cut. The tulip poplars and eastern hemlocks there are immense, some of the largest trees in the park, and the canopy closes high enough above your head that the grove has the feel of a cathedral.
The grove is named for Horace Albright, the second director of the National Park Service, who championed the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties.
The lower section of the trail itself is Civilian Conservation Corps work. Between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen thirty-five, a CCC camp operated near the Maddron Bald trailhead, and the corps built the stone-lined trail bed, the retaining walls, and the drainage structures that are still in use today. The trail is also named after a local family: Lawson Maddron was a Cocke County minister who lived from eighteen oh nine to eighteen ninety-six, and his family cemetery sits near the junction with the Old Settlers Trail.
The bald at the top takes its name from the same family. In the Smokies, these open summits are a puzzle, ecologists still debate whether they are natural features or the result of centuries of grazing by Cherokee and later Appalachian farmers. Either way, the view from Maddron Bald reaches south toward the main crest of the Smokies, a ridge that has no roads crossing it for forty miles.
