Abstract:
On July 30, 1936, fifty guests and scores of U.S. Forest Service personnel gathered near Robbinsville to listen to a message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicating the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest. The forest, 3,800 acres of woodland lying in Graham County, is the last virgin forest on the East Coast and constitutes one of the remnants of the original forest that covered the slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. It has never been touched by an axe and will remain so. It was dedicated to the American soldier-poet, Joyce Kilmer, who wrote the famous poem “Trees,\" and was later killed in World War I on July 30, 1918.