[moehoward]

.....ok, now we are talking about “underbrush”.....

good lord.....

[Pelham]

“.....ok, now we are talking about “underbrush”..... good lord.....”

Underbrush is anything other than mature trees. When the Indians burned out the underbrush the fire removed saplings that would have grown into dense forest. The forest the colonists encountered was open enough to allow the colonists to ride their horses through it at will. They left paintings of what the forest looked like to them as well as their written descriptions.

By the time of the Civil War many eastern farms in tobacco country had been abandoned due to depletion of the soil. These abandoned farms became dense wilderness growth much different than what the colonists encountered.