SAHC's History

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 SAHC, in partnership with other organizations, federal and state agencies, as well as private groups and individuals who systematically quilted together a landscape-scale conservation site. Conservation ownerships today include the Pisgah and Cherokee National Forests, Tennessee’s Hampton Creek Cove State Natural Area, The Nature Conservancy’s Big Yellow Mountain Preserve and numerous SAHC and other privately owned tracts.

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.