Dolly Sods

The Dolly Sods area was first encountered by whites when Peter Jefferson, Thomas Lewis and others surveyed in 1746 to find the limits of Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron’s land grant from the British Crown. The famous Fairfax Line grazes the northern margin of the Wilderness near Bear Rocks. This area was generally avoided as too impenetrable to easily traverse until the late 19th century. David Hunter Strother wrote an early and somewhat breathless travelogue of the area, published in Harper's Monthly magazine in 1852 "In Randolph County, Virginia, is a tract of country containing from seven to nine hundred square miles, entirely uninhabited, and so savage and inaccessible that it has rarely been penetrated even by the most adventurous. The settlers on its borders speak of it with a sort of dread, and regard it as an ill omened region, filled with bears, panthers impassable laurel-brakes, and dangerous precipices. Stories are told of hunters having ventured too far becoming entangled, and perishing in its intricate labyrinths. The desire of daring the unknown dangers of this mysterious region, stimulated a party of gentlemen to undertake it in June, 1851. They did actually penetrate the country as far as the Falls of the Blackwater, and returned with marvelous accounts of its savage grandeur, and the quantities of game and fish to be found there." The really high areas in Dolly Sods and Flatrock-Roaring Plains were once mostly covered by dense, ancient red spruce and eastern hemlock forest. The trees were 60 to 90 feet (27m) tall (18 27 m) and some measured at least 12 feet (370cm) in diameter. The greatest stand of red spruce in the world, in terms of size and quality, could be found along the upper Red Creek. The largest recorded tree ever cut in West Virginia was a white oak, harvested in this region. Nearly as large as a Giant Sequoia, it was probably well over 1,000 years old and measured 13 feet (4m) in diameter at a height of 16 feet (5m), and 10 feet (3m) in diameter 31 feet (9.4m) above the base. We will probably never know how large the biggest trees in West Virginia were because most cuttings were not documented. Centuries of accumulated needles from these trees created a blanket of humus seven to nine feet deep. The name Dolly Sods derives from the family name of Johann Dahle (1749 through1847), a German immigrant who homesteaded nearby. Such early settlers utilized the natural open fields on mountainsides known as "sods". Logged out and burned over areas produced additional good grass cover for grazing sheep and cattle. (Repeated burning, however, killed the grass and left only bracken fern, which was useless as fodder.) Locals changed the spelling of Dahle to "Dolly" and thus one such area became known as Dolly Sods. The Dahle family eventually moved on, leaving behind only the Americanized version of their name. Local historian Hu Maxwell described the Dolly Sods area in the Wheeling Intelligencer in 1886: "The top of the mountain is flat, except here and there rugged ridges and huge promontories of rocks rising above the level of the plains, and giving the scene an appearance of distance and mystery that must be witnessed before it can be understood".