Preserving Alabama’s Flagg Mountain, the Southernmost Appalachian Peak

WEOGUFKA, Ala.—At first glance, the oldest known tree in Alabama doesn’t look like much.

If anything, it seems a bit like a 40-foot version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, sparse branches twisting out in different directions, perched perilously on the face of a cliff with a dirt road encroaching it on one side and nothing but air on the other.

But here on the south side of Flagg Mountain in east-central Alabama, that lonely longleaf pine has been clinging on, digging deep into the bedrock of the sandstone cliff face for nearly 400 years.

“It’s an ugly tree, isn’t it?” said John Goff, director of the Alabama Forestry Commission’s Forest Protection Division.

Dated to around the 1620s, the tree was almost 200 years old when Alabama became the 22nd state in 1819. It even survived the construction of the dirt road almost up against its trunk in the 1930s, when the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps built a watchtower atop the mountain.

“I don’t know how the thing’s still alive,” Goff said. “Any other tree would have been dead when they put the road through.

Now, a diverse coalition of interests are working to preserve and protect the mountain and its surroundings. The top of Flagg Mountain has been preserved since the 1930s as part of the Weogufka State Forest, but much of the surrounding land was owned by private interests until recently.

The Nature Conservancy in Alabama last year purchased two adjacent tracts and dedicated more than 1,000 acres as the Fenvkvc?kv Creek Preserve.

The name (pronounced finuh-guh-jee-guh) is the closest English approximation to the original Muscogee (or Maskoke) language for the creek winding around the base of the mountain.

The Maskoke indigenous people have also established a 2,100 acre off-grid ecovillage around Flagg Mountain to reestablish their language and culture while preserving the land they were forcibly removed from 180 years ago.

With additional contributions from The Conservation Fund and the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, more than 4,000 acres around Flagg Mountain have been dedicated for preservation and recreational activities like hiking or camping.

Restoring the Longleaf Ecosystem

On a recent trip to Flagg Mountain, Tassin, from the Nature Conservancy in Alabama, pulls his SUV to a stop in the middle of a dirt road after descending a few hundred yards from the parking lot near the summit.

The stopping place was about halfway between the summit parking lot and the small shelter that marks the beginning of the Pinhoti Trail. Any other driver would have rolled down the bumpy mountain path without a second thought about the large but scraggly pine tree on the south face of the mountain.

Only a Band-Aid-shaped metal tag nailed into the trunk hints that the tree is different from the other tall pines on the mountain, that it’s in fact, the oldest tree in the state.

“It never looks as good in a picture as it does in real life,” Tassin said.

He said the tree’s age was determined by taking a core sample through the trunk and counting the rings inside. The count indicated the tree is now about 397 years old.

But the tree is not just old. It’s old-growth. When the seed first sprouted, longleaf pine covered about 92 million acres of the American South, in a swath from east Texas to Virginia.

Now, only about 3 percent of the longleaf ecosystem remains and much less of it old-growth forests that remain more or less as the ecosystem evolved naturally.

“Flagg Mountain is one of the most unique parts of [the longleaf ecosystem], because there’s actually old-growth longleaf here,” Tassin said, adding that multiple trees are more than 200 years old.

Much of the region’s original longleaf forests were cleared entirely or replaced with species like the loblolly pine, which grows rapidly and in dense thickets, ideal for the timber industry.

Longleaf pines grow slowly, sometimes for centuries, spaced far apart from their neighbors, fostering grassy plains habitat for species like the red-cockaded woodpecker, indigo snake and gopher tortoise.

Flagg Mountain is too far north for the indigo snake or the gopher tortoise, but Tassin said the hope is that a restored longleaf system there would provide more habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker, which was recently downlisted from endangered to threatened under the Endangered Species Act, thanks largely to longleaf conservation and restoration efforts.

“One of the only remaining populations of red cockaded woodpeckers in this part of the state occurs on Lake Mitchell, on state and Alabama Power property, and that’s only about six or seven miles as the red cockaded woodpecker flies,” Tassin said. “And we also have populations in the Talladega National Forest to the north.

“So if we can restore enough habitat here, this would be the perfect place, sort of the island in the middle of those two places.”

But to do that, the area needs to burn. Longleaf pine forests depend on periodic fires to survive, clearing out the underbrush and sending the signal for new longleaf seedlings to start growing.

Now, thick layers of duff, a clump of slow-to-decay pine needles and other growth, carpet much of the forest. That duff would burn too hot and kill the mature longleaf trees if burned indiscriminately. Since 2019, Tassin and the Nature Conservancy have been working to reintroduce fire into the ecosystem, conducting slow, controlled burns in wet conditions to knock back the duff layer without wiping out the entire forest.

A natural, lightning-strike fire in 2023 showed the vulnerability of the ecosystem, as many of Flagg Mountain’s mature longleaf pines perished from the intensity of the blaze.

“We were losing the system,” Goff said. “Like you could walk out through there and you’d see just as many dead pines as you did live pines, although some of them might have been dead for 100 years.

“So this will start cleaning it up, opening up the understory and the mid story, and give us some opportunity for some recruitment of new pine to fill those gaps.”

Hiking Spurs Conservation Efforts

Goff, who grew up in Coosa County not far from the mountain, said the spot was mostly off the radar.

The 1930s-era watchtower is listed on the National Historic Lookout Register, and so is a similar stone tower at Mount Cheaha, Alabama’s highest point, which attracts far more visitors.

Goff said the efforts to preserve Flagg Mountain accelerated as the Pinhoti Trail grew in popularity over the past decade or so.

“It just really wasn’t on the radar and then probably 10 years ago or so, people started taking interest in it,” Goff said.

The Conservation Fund began acquiring land around Flagg Mountain beginning around 2010 to move the Pinhoti farther from highways and make it a true “off-road” trail.

“I was really shocked at how much incredible longleaf there was still remaining down here,” Tassin said of his first experiences at Flagg Mountain. “And so, we have since been working to acquire other tracts.”

As the trail gains popularity, the Forestry Commission is improving the infrastructure around the mountain to accommodate hikers and campers. The state is now installing water pipes up the mountain to bring running water to the available primitive campsites.

Now the state has declared 2025 the “year of Alabama trails,” promoting hiking and outdoor opportunities through its tourism board. Flagg Mountain is featured on the cover of this year’s state tourism magazine.

“In the long run, I think it’d be really good for Coosa County,” Goff said. “There’s not much tourism or anything like that for Coosa, and so hopefully, as more people come, somebody takes chances and puts up stores, that kind of stuff, to kind of keep some of that money in the county.”