The First Food Forests of the American South

Recovering Native Perennial Agroecology in Our Region

A raven perched in a shell-bark hickory—one of the vital trees of Muskogean “food forestry”—as depicted by Audubon in his Birds of America, this plate from the Havell edition

On the face of it, the idea of the “food forest” or “forest garden,” to say nothing of “community food forest,” seems to be pretty novel, and in some ways it is pretty new, the outgrowth of the permaculture movement of the late twentieth century. However the concept of the food forest, or of perennial agriculture more generally, did not spring out of nowhere, but looked to exemplars from past and present indigenous peasant societies around the world. When we look for analogues and antecedents in the past, many of which were unknown to the pioneers of twentieth century permaculture and agroforestry, we discover a vast array of examples, including here in our own region. As we build new agroecological commons and practices today the work of bringing to light past practices takes on special urgency, not just as a matter of historical curiosity or as an ethical act of memory recovery, but as exemplars and inspirations for ways of producing food and governing shared commons that we can know long flourished in this landscape.

To understand the historical legacy of food forest-like agroecologies in the Mid-South we need to know some wider ecological and historical background. Chattanooga lies at the juncture of several distinct ecologies, something that has probably been true since the end of the last ice age, multiple geological structures shaping the natural and, eventually, the human configurations to arise here. While we tend to associate our region with the historical Cherokee presence, most Cherokee settlement here was comparatively late, a product of the massive historical forces that were remaking the world in the eighteenth century, including the Southern Appalachians. Prior to the eighteenth century Chattanooga and its immediate hinterland would have been inhabited primarily by Muskogean language speakers, most likely speakers of Koasati, along with speakers of Yuchi, a language isolate, with Cherokee speakers dwelling a little further north towards the Hiwassee. Muskogean culture long shaped this region and much of the rest of the central American South, a legacy that even casual observers can descry through the musical place names that dot Mississippi, Alabama, parts of Georgia, and a few points in Tennessee, “Chattanooga,” “Chickamauga,” and “Wauhatchie,” to name three from this immediate area, among them.

The history of native peoples in the South is complex, especially in the world-changing early modern period which began with the sixteenth century Spanish entradas—most famously (or infamously) that of Hernando de Soto. To make a long story short, by the mid-seventeenth century the human landscape of the South had been reconfigured, with the world that de Soto and other early European visitors encountered no longer existing, replaced by the tribal nations familiar in some fashion to most Americans today: the Cherokee, the Creek, the Choctaw, and a handful of others, for the most part formed out of the remnants of Mississippian peoples devastated by disease and the effects of early modern globalization and imperial politics. Agriculture changed to some degree as a result: new crops appeared in the wake of the entradas, and by the eighteenth century—the period for which we start to have extensive historical descriptive data of everyday life and ecology—Muskogean-speaking and other native cultures were drawing closer to that of their Euro-American neighbors (some of whom were literal neighbors, settling into and often marrying into native societies).

All of this is to say that we do not know precisely what “food forest” like practices would have been employed by native peoples here prior to the early modern period (that is, before 1540), but we can look to historical descriptions and other forms of data in order to get a pretty good idea. And indeed if we turn to the descriptions of eighteenth and early nineteenth century Muskogean cultures in what are now the states of Alabama and Georgia, found in the writings of observers like Benjamin Hawkins and William Bartram, we see practices that we could pretty accurately call “food forestry.” In particular, many Muskogean Creek communities cultivated, maintained, and protected extensive oak and hickory groves adjacent to their villages that provided, as we will see, an important staple of their diets. The following description by scholar Robbie Ethridge relates to eighteenth and nineteenth century communities a little further south of us, though the practices certainly went back much further and most likely would have existed in and around what would become Chattanooga:

Creek women collected quantities of hickory nuts and acorns in the hinterlands, but the large stands of hickory and oak trees near the towns were undoubtedly maintained for this purpose. Additional evidence is provided by Bartram, who, passing through the Chattahoochee towns, repeatedly described alternating prairies and groves of hickory and oak trees. When Hawkins wanted to build a blacksmith shop near Tuckabatchee on the Tallapoosa River, the townspeople became upset when the smith and his assistants cut trees when clearing land on the site. The practice of maintaining groves of nut-bearing trees, in fact, may have been quite old. Bartram, while exploring an abandoned Mississippian mound center on the upper Little River, in present-day Georgia, observed a large grove of shell-bark hickory and black walnut in the vicinity. Although he does not indicate where he got this information, Bartram understands that the “ancients” had cultivated these trees for their nut masts.¹

Given the size and polyculture of these forests—which seem to have perhaps been deliberately planted or otherwise managed, and which might well have been cleared of underbrush and unwanted trees to encourage tree growth and to make collection easier—they really deserve the name “food forests” and not orchards or groves only. Such forests were also “fuel forests,” as both the inedible parts of mast as well as fallen limbs and logs were important for keeping home fires burning, literally. I do not know at least whether other species would have been cultivated within such expanses, or what other functions these forests might have played, but there are many indications that they were common across the Muskogean culture zone and probably beyond.

Native agriculture in general in the South and lower Midwest—and archeological evidence suggests a long genealogy for these practices—was one based on a mosaic of land uses and food sources, in part made necessary by the absence of domesticated animals for meat and manure production. Wild fruits, nuts, plants, game mammals, fish, mussels, and so on remained vital sources of nutrition and potent cultural symbols long after farming and sedentary village life were taken up. Indeed aspects of such a lifestyle have survived into the present in the rural South, even if in much diminished forms today. The nut-producing “food forests” of the Muskogee Creek (and no doubt other native peoples of our wider region) were but one way that farmers drew upon and encouraged the bounty of the land. Other trees were pretty clearly deliberately cultivated in stands that fit into the model of the food forest: managed, but not in the intense manner of annual vegetable production; it is likely that some form of fruit and nut tree management dates back to the Archaic period, preceding “conventional” agriculture entirely. Of a less managed nature but still vital was the widespread practice of letting farm land go fallow for extended periods of time, during which fruit and berry producers would flourish on the formerly cleared soil, providing food directly for humans while also acting as habitat for wild game.

All of these agro-ecosystems were managed as commons of some sort, not private holdings, even as the precise rules that governed their use and maintenance are often unclear or lost entirely today. Probably different tiers of land use involved different sorts of governance and decision-making: areas set aside for specific animal populations, for instance (such as Creek “beloved bear grounds,” forests reserved for bear population recovery),² would have needed buy-in from everyone in a given area, while more distant and less intensively used upland forests rich with mast-producers might have been more free and open to anyone whose community had the requisite hunting rights.

But returning to nuts: if many of the annual vegetable staples of historical native Southern peoples are totally familiar to us today, the place of wild and semi-wild nuts seems a little foreign—odds are good few if any readers will have tried acorns or hickories except perhaps as a novelty, and if anything we tend to treat them as nuisances today. For Muskogean peoples this was certainly not the case. Their importance and some forms of use can be seen in this entry from Benjamin Hawkins’ letters:

The lands every where covered with acorns and hickory nuts. Some of the women who saw and knew me at St. Mary's immediately recollected me, they expressed pleasure at seeing me among them, and at the same time said they were poor, and had not good things to give, their food being so different from what they saw at the table of the commissioners of the U. States. They were apprehensive I would find uncomfortable living among them. They sent me a present of bean bread and dumplins [sic], some oil of hickory nuts, pleasant to the taste, and some milk of the same nuts.

The process is simple, they pick up the nuts, dry them, pound them in a mortar, fan them, to free the kernels as much as possible from the shells. They then apply water, mix up the mass with their hands, and work it something like the bakers neading [sic] their bread, as the oil rises they separate it from the remains which is the milk.³

Elsewhere Hawkins describes how acorns were processed:

I saw on the path as I came here some women picking up red oak acorns, for the purpose of making oil. They gather the acorns, dry them on reed mats, hull them, beat them fine in a mortar, mix them up in water and let them stand for an evening. The oil rises to the top, and they skim it off with a feather. This oil is used as food; one bushel of acorns makes about a pint of oil.⁴

Mast, whether collected from more or less wild woods or from managed “food forests,” was used in other ways as well, with abundant archeological evidence going far back in the record. “Nutting stones,” like the one depicted above (source), have been found all over the South and beyond, sometimes as portable stones, sometimes in situ in bedrock or as part of large boulders. How these traditions of use, land management, and commons governance developed will probably always remain opaque. The Muskogean food forests themselves were no doubt transformed in various ways once their original cultivators were forcibly removed by the American state, their lands doled out to Anglo-American settlers. Perhaps some of the nut groves continued in some form of use, while certainly others would have been chopped down and used as fuel and lumber, their traces gradually disappearing over the intervening two centuries along with most of the memory of the native peoples who once cultivated them.

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Across the South, especially in the highlands of the Southern Appalachians and its subsidiary ranges, similar practices of foraging, semi-managed perennial agriculture, and the like were often picked up or developed by the white settlers who came to inhabit these lands after the expulsion of the Cherokee and Creek and others. It is possible in some cases that traditions of foraging and land use were passed on directly; in other cases as mountain folks “became native” to this place over the last two centuries they discovered many of the same wild foods and crafted sustainable ways of harvesting and using the bounty of the landscape. In historical Cherokee country and elsewhere the American chestnut figured prominently into such practices, at least until it was wiped out by the blight. Traditions of hickory and walnut gathering—less so acorns—persisted right up into this century, and linger on in some places (see the Library of Congress collection from which the below mid-1990s image came for snapshots of such a commons survival in West Virginia).

The community food forest model that we have been trying to develop here in and around Chattanooga is of course different in the details, scope, species profile, and so forth from the food forests that Muskogean speakers and others almost certainly once cultivated in this very landscape hundreds of years ago. Yet the spirit is similar, both in terms of encouraging a mosaic of ecologies for human and non-human use and in terms of maintaining growing and harvesting spaces that are managed as commons for specific communities. While native peoples of the historic period no doubt had long traditions of perennial agriculture and commons governance upon which to build—even when pushed into new places somewhat south or west of their previous homelands—we are in many cases starting from scratch, figuring out what works ecologically, socially, culturally, and so forth, developing models and spreading ideas and practices that might not be intuitive right now.

By looking to the models laid out by the first food foresters of this land we can see what worked in the past and discover new—to us!—ways of thinking about what constitutes food and how to recognize and cultivate it. Hickories, oaks, and walnut trees remain common here, even if we do not have cultivated forests managed specifically for them; just learning to use the bounty our wild trees provide would be an important first step, after which integrating these native trees and historical practices into our developing food forest sites could make sense. Who knows—perhaps one day in the not too distant future we will have community food forests of native mast-producers, supplying food and fuel and beauty once again for the people who today call these valleys and mountains and ridges home.

1. Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003, p. 60.

2. “O-fuc-she has its source near Ko-e-ne-cuh, thirty miles from the river, and runs north. It has eight or nine forks, and the land is good on all of them. The growth is oak, hickory, poplar, cherry, persimon [sic], with cane brakes on the flats and hills. It is a delightful range for stock, and was preserved by the Indians for bears, and called the beloved bear-ground. Every town had a reserve of this sort exclusively; but as the cattle increase and the bears decrease, they are hunted in common.” Benjamin Hawkins, Creek Confederacy and A Sketch of the Creek Country, Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1848, p. 33.

3. Benjamin Hawkins, Letters of Benjamin Hawkins 1796- 1806, Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1916, p. 38.

4. Ibid., p. 31.