SAHC's History & Mission

We are a non-profit organization (a land trust) working to conserve the unique plant and animal habitat, clean water, and scenic beauty of the mountains of North Carolina and east Tennessee for the benefit of present and future generations. We achieve this by forging and maintaining conservation relationships with landowners and public agencies, owning and managing land, and working with communities to accomplish their conservation objectives.

The trail that brought us here: a half century of hiking hopes and dreams.

In the early 1950’s, the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) decided to replace 24 miles of A.T. road-walking in Tennessee with 72 miles of new trails. The new route coursed from the summits of Roan High Knob and Roan High Bluff across Carvers Gap to the grassy balds of the Roan Highlands. Stanley Murray, who would later chair the ATC from 1961 to 1975, championed the project. Early on, the group realized that a narrow focus on protecting the Appalachian Trail corridor would not be enough to preserve the many-textured treasures of Roan and the Southern Appalachian Highlands. In 1974, members of that committee formed an independent land trust: The Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy.

The Conservancy pursued ambitious conservation goals, and over the next quarter century protected over 21,000 acres in Tennessee and North Carolina, including 15,000 acres in the Highlands of Roan and more than 6,000 acres elsewhere in our mountain region.

Such an achievement could not have happened without the leadership of the Conservancy, in partnership with other organizations and agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service.

In a "pitch-in-and-do-it" expression of its stewardship role, the Conservancy brings together people each summer for ecological monitoring, trail maintenance and community outreach. Hundreds of volunteers devote thousands of hours, for example, cutting back dense blackberry brambles on Roan so the threatened plants and animals that live among the bald's thick grasses and sedges can continue to thrive.