Waist-high grasses billowing in the
wind. Rolling prairie expanses. Most
people connect these images with the Midwest's Great Plains. But for
thousands of years, tallgrass
soils of Alabama's Black Belt. Along
prairie—25 miles across at its widest
people connect these images with
prairies covered the lime-rich clay
the margins of this long ribbon of
point—oak-hickory forests grew
in more acidic soils. Both humans
and wildlife thrived in this mosaic
of open, fire-maintained grasslands
edged in woodlands.
Today, scientists estimate that less
than 1% of Alabama's tallgrass
prairie remains. That's bad news
for the countless species of plants
and wildlife that depend on prairie—habitat from northern bobwhites
to prairie kingsnakes. Alabama has
developed a State Wildlife Action
Plan (SWAP) that details a strategy
to conserve wildlife by protecting
their habitat. Alabama's SWAP
encourages prescribed burning
as one key way to restore and
maintain tallgrass prairie. It lists
Old Cahawba as a priority site for
prairie conservation work.
Changing Culture and Landscape
"I see the Indian fires going out. Soon they will be cold.... I leave
the graves of my fathers, for the Indian fires are almost gone."
-Yoholo-Micco
Chief of Eufaula Town, speaking to the Alabama Legislature, 1836
When Herando de Soto passed through Alabama in 1540, his men carried diseases that decimated native communities. As Europeans and then Americans began to settle this region in the 18th and
19th centuries, a tightening vise of treaties and land policy slowly squeezed the remaining native people from the land. After the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the federal government relocated most of Alabama's surviving indigenous people west of the Mississippi. Settlers initially avoided the Black Belt's thickly-sodded grasslands, because they mistakenly believed the treeless prairie was unproductive. But by the 1830s, planters coveted the region's fertile soils. Across the Black Belt, tallgrass prairie gave way to cotton fields.
Precious Fragments
Sites like Old Cahawba protect Alabama's remaining
tallgrass prairie. This and other prairie fragments
harbor rare plants like celestial lily, Great Plains
ladies'-tresses, and white lady's slipper. Some, like
the newly discovered Old Cahawba rosinweed, grow
nowhere else in the world. Many rare and declining
wildlife species—including the loggerhead shrike,
northern bobwhite, and lark sparrow—inhabit these
remnant grasslands.
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