A Wild Little Story at Orchard Knob
by Mary Barnett, Programs & Projects Manager, National Park Partners
The stories inside our national park are as layered as the soil beneath our feet.
As the region’s largest open public space with over 9,000 acres of preserved public land, we are largely familiar with the Civil War stories from inside America’s first preserved battlefields in Chickamauga and Chattanooga. Archaeologists have only just begun to interpret 12,000 years of Native American stories from inside the Moccasin Bend Archaeological District, the nation’s first and only designated Archaeological District. On Orchard Knob and in Chickamauga, the geological stories formed in limestone cedar glades reveal remnants of a botanical history that almost disappeared, while providing resilient habitats for rare native flowers and other flora.
The purpose of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park is to “preserve, protect and interpret for the benefit of the public the nationally significant history, stories, and resources associated with the Civil War campaign for Chattanooga including the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga.” To this end, the park’s commemorative features and historic landscapes are carefully and routinely managed in order to accurately honor a moment in time where some of our country’s bloodiest history unfolded. A team of passionate and dedicated resource management park service staff and volunteers take great care to restore and maintain these landscapes to resemble how they looked at the time of the battles.
But in other areas of the park, places within these places, unique and wild landscapes are monitored and studied so that these fragile habitats have the best chance at survival, undisturbed. This is especially true at our park’s smallest unit, Orchard Knob Reservation. Taking up just two city blocks, the National Park is a small but mighty place and the highest elevation in an otherwise compact residential urban neighborhood.
Researchers at UTC’s Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, including Joey Shaw, Ph.D., and graduate student, Alaina Krakowiak, authored the 2019 whitepaper, The Vascular Flora of Orchard Knob Reservation, Chattanooga, Tennessee. It documents their 2016 findings after a string of discoveries prompted by a resident of the neighborhood, Charli Wyatt. Wyatt needed help identifying an odd flower she had never seen before growing on the knob. That specimen turned out to be rare in Tennessee, and Krakowiak, an undergrad, decided to take on a fuller study of the entire site as the focus of her environmental studies thesis at UTC. In cooperation with the NPS resource management staff, the mowing and spraying schedules were adjusted to allow for data collection and to provide a healthier native landscape.
The team identified six rare, state-ranked species, as well as many species restricted to limestone glade, prairie, and/or calcareous woodland habitats found on the Knob. The glade, or rock outcroppings that can be seen along Orchard Knob Avenue, are a part of the same limestone bedrock found throughout our region that was formed during the middle of the Ordovician period about 460 million years ago. A floristic survey was conducted across two growing seasons, yielding 212 taxa across 152 genera and 58 families, including a percentage of non-natives, according to the report. According to Wyatt, the spectacle of a robust blooming season is simply heart bursting.
Even though The Battle At Orchard Knob in 1863 is considered a minor battle, those rapidly developing events over three days in November had an intense physical impact on the Knob itself, and would prove to have a significantly higher impact on what would become of Orchard Knob after the war. If not for becoming part of the nation’s first preserved battlefield - and remaining under those protections for the last 130 years - that 460 million year old limestone glade along the eastern rim of the Knob would likely have been dug out and hauled downtown to be used as highly desirable building material. Today, it is a sunny, hot and mostly dry habitat and microhabitat for small populations of camassia scilloides, or wild hyacinth, Opuntia cespitosa, or eastern prickly pear, and sometimes Charli’s elusive clematis fremontii, or Fremont’s leather flower.
Part of our mission at National Park Partners is to engage current and future generations in preserving and promoting the stories of these national treasures. In this new blog series about Orchard Knob, we’ll explore what this piece of the National Park means to the community that surrounds it today; its place in the 20th century stories that brought us out of the Civil War and through the Civil Rights era; and new projects and partnerships designed to strengthen connections with park families in the Orchard Knob community. We’ll also continue to follow the wildflower growing season this year and share galleries of the show!
We hope you will support our work by sharing these stories, and if you are able, making a financial contribution today.
Historical photographs of Orchard Knob Reservation. Top: Looking eastward from behind earthworks atop Orchard Knob toward the barren spine of Missionary Ridge during the Civil War (Barnard 1864). Bottom: A roadside view of the southwestern corner of Orchard Knob Reservation before the retaining wall was constructed in 1901, and some of the surrounding, rocky landscape (Davis et al. 1968). Composite courtesy of Alaina Krakowiak