Some Shakerag Past

The descent to the Shakerag trail.

What element makes a certain place more sacred or cherished than another? Sewanee, TN has been noted by many travelers and citizens as a place of unfathomable beauty; “A towered city set within a wood,” (Rev. Gardiner Tucker). A letter from a federal soldier during the Civil War reads that on the “site of the grand Southern University… is one of the best camping grounds I know of. Near our quarters is a very large spring of the clearest and finest water I ever drank… This place is so delightful and cool that I had hoped we might be permitted to spend the whole summer here…” (Baker, et al, p. 26). One place in particular, the focus of this study, Shakerag Hollow, what Harvard professor E.O. Wilson described as “a cathedral of nature,” is a cool valley nestled into the plateau. Sandstone cliffs hedge one side of the hollow as the other slopes gently down the mountain, traversing several more geologic layers. It was not until somewhat recently, around the 1980s, when this piece of forest began to gain real importance to locals, children, walkers, climbers, students, and teachers who have found solace in the hollow which continues to nourish and educate its creatures.

What story do the greens have hidden in their leaves and roots?

Shakerag has weathered human use for thousands of years; as one of the University of the South’s esteemed professors of biology David Haskell put it, there were“Multiple native American cultures [here] before Europeans arrived… almost certainly people were using the land there going back thousands of years… the name itself leaves an imprint of humans’ use of the Hollow…. How can we truly piece together the history? We can’t know… but the botanical imprint is very clear… [some] people go into Shakerag and they’re looking… for the places where we might see some vestige of what a forest might have been like before humanity impacted it quite heavily… the effects of prior land-use echo down over decades… maybe even hundreds of years…” This place is a home to a world of human and biological stories and experiences, which visitors contribute to by merely taking part in its majesty as a traveler through natural wonder.

The history of Shakerag is scattered and loosely documented, relying mostly on the passing down of information, which keeps it “shrouded in a certain degree of mystery” and, so ponders the walker, “who has walked here before me?” As professor of geology Bran Potter said, “It has this lore, in the best sense, that is passed on from generation to generation and what’s happening now in this particular time is that we are unpacking some of that lore, finding some of it is myth, some of it is real.” There has been activity on the plateau for thousands of years or longer, “8000 years ago [people] were using Shakerag Hollow… And that’s the most of the human interactions with Shakerag and every other place around here…” [Haskell]. The word “sewanee” is of the Shawnee people and translated it means “south” or “southern,” as the entire Cumberland Plateau was described by the natives. The namesake of Shakerag Hollow, as stated by born and raised resident and graduate of the University of the South, Harry Clark, is “apocryphal, it is received wisdom.” The story goes that interested drinkers would wave (or shake) a rag at a location in the hollow, leave money, come back later on, and there, in a hidden spot, would be waiting a bottle of Tennessee moonshine.

Could this old homesite, now overtaken by daffodils, be the home of a moonshiner?

This “received” story alludes to the multitudes of human and biological experience that have occurred and are occurring beneath the canopy, yet today, we can only make educated guesses as to the exact past goings on in the hollow. Harry Clark’s wife Kathy, also a graduate of the University, said “this area used to be full of people from sharecropping and working the fields and there’s no more of the little houses left, but when I was here in the early 70s you could still see the little shacks…” What seems like such a pure and untouched land is only a hand full of decades into its reclamation.

So the question remains, what can be gained from knowing the past experience in Shakerag Hollow? David Haskell responded to this question by saying, “For me, it’s about getting to know my family, my distant cousins—the beetles. About getting to know the ecology of my home community. There are so many stories there. The stories continue to amaze me, it’s a very story rich hollow and for me many of those stories are biological, but those biological stories interweave with the other stories from pre-history and history and deep time in biology as well… There are deep biological stories that transcend the human one.” Getting in touch with a landscape that contains so much experience and yet remains almost dreamlike in its ancient beauty, is a rare and wonderful opportunity. “… There are very few places in Eastern North America that are so easy to access and yet allow you to breath that forest and hear that diversity of birds singing and see such big trees all in one place… there are other places… but not right in our back yard” (Haskell).