What Good is Rivercane? - Part Two

TITLE:              What Good is Rivercane? – Part Two

AUTHOR:        Jim Stokely    

SOURCE:         Mississippi State University website; Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Great Meadow (New York: Viking, 1930); Foster Sondley, My Ancestry (privately
                          published, 1930)

COPYRIGHT:   Fair use

“Once a dominant feature of the southeastern United States,” say researchers from Mississippi State University, “canebrakes dominated hundreds of thousands of acres along floodplains and stream bottoms. In the 1770’s, William Bartram explored much of the southeast United States and…remarked,‘…cane meadows always in view on one hand or the other.’”[i]

In The Great Meadow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ novel about the White settlement of Kentucky, the Hall family in Tidewater Virginia is visited by a neighbor who tells the rapt family what a surveyor of the western lands told him about “Caintuck”: “He said a buffalo road goes north and south through the land, where the beasts go to salt themselves at the great licks…He surveyed, he said, twenty thousand acres in a fine cane country, and ne’er a tree in the whole boundary, but now and then one beside a watercourse or maybe in the uplands. Cane from eight feet high and upwards to twelve feet. The soil rich like cream.”[ii]

Closer to home, Buncombe County, North Carolina historian Foster Sondley noted: “It was in the canebrakes which then reached down the Swannanoa River by the location of Biltmore to the French Broad that in the days immediately preceding the first occupation of that country by white men a party of the latter for seven days fought some Cherokees hiding in the canes…”[iii]

Over the years, we have succeeded in managing rivercane down to 2% of the land coverage it once was. So…what good is rivercane? Returning to Mississippi State University’s website:

“Stands of rivercane (canebrakes) have been shown to be effective riparian buffers, trapping sediments and nutrients from agricultural and other surface runoff. On-going studies at Southern Illinois University show that a mature canebrake (30 year-old) was found to reduce groundwater nitrates by 99%, reduce nutrients in surface runoff…by 100%, and reduce sediments by 100% within a 10 m[eter] buffer. In all cases, the canebrake was a more effective buffer than the adjacent forest…

“Canebrakes also provide valuable habitat for wildlife. Historical accounts along with modern surveys identify at least 21 mammal species, 16 bird species, 4 reptile (snake) species, and >20 species of Lepidoptera [butterflies and moths] are found within canebrakes…Historically, canebrakes were used by elk, bison, black bear, cougar, bobcat, and wolves, species which are now rare or unknown in the southeastern U.S..”[iv]

WHAT WOULD A MATURE AND EXTENSIVE STAND OF RIVERCANE DO FOR ASHEVILLE’S RIVER ARTS DISTRICT AND FOR THE CITY’S STATURE AS A TOURIST AND RETIREE DESTINATION?

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[i] Mississippi State University, rivercane.msstate.edu/node/4, retrieved 12/21/2024.

[ii] Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Great Meadow (New York: Viking, 1930), page 10.

[iii] F.A.Sondley, My Ancestry, privately published, 1930, pages 240-1.

[iv] Mississippi State University, rivercane.msstate.edu/node/5, retrieved 12/21/2024.

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