The Haw Fields
Haw Fields lying between the Haw and Eno Rivers, was a 50,000 acre cleared meadow once used by Native
Americans as a hunting field. They burned it off a couple of times each
year so that there favored game animals would come there to feed on the
resulting grass shoots. All that slash and burn attention meant the
land was both relatively unwooded, and had rich top soils resulting from
both the burning and the manuring of the grazing herds of deer and
buffalo and maybe even elk. After harvesting their summer crops,
native folks probably moved up, away from the foggy, cold corn-bottoms
to their hunting grounds. There as hunters harvested hides and laid in
venison for jerky, the ladies harvested the rich, oak mast; they mashed
and dried acorn flower for the coming seasons. The first Europeans who
saw the Haw Fields probably thought they'd died and gone to heaven.
John Lawson waxed euphoric about that land in his 1709 real estate
prospectus, New Voyage to Carolina.
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