LAND USE Guide

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 12: Land Use

LAND USE Guide, 1913 – present

TAGS: Land Use Guide, land use documents, Dollar Branch, Lands Unsuitable for Mining, Little Shepherd Trail, Laden Trail, Land Use Plan c. 1913, Maps of PMSS Area, Timber and Logging, publications

To be landless is not to lack property
But to lack responsibility
Scott Russell Sanders

Land use is how we negotiate our space. Space can be used as one of the analytical tools we study in order to think historically. Yet, as Doreen Massy* has reminded us, “We cannot understand place by enclosing it in boundaries … space is a simultaneity of stories so far …” and is created by the connections of people to the land and connections between peoples and bigger geographies.

The space in which Pine Mountain was created is more than geography and has been and is continually shaped, managed, and studied through actions that take place between those people. How those people occupy the space and their larger cultural geographies often determines what direction the land use will take. Land use is fluid. It is dynamic, it is a historical record and it is often contentious. At Pine Mountain, this melding of the social, the physical and the mental — three types of space that Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space, 1974, sees as fundamental — can be seen in the archival record (documents and photographs) as well as in the current physical evidence of that space that is theirs. That space contains their stories. But space is also the land space that is documented in the official record.

Dollar Branch following restoration. [OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA, P8030003.jpg]

See: Massy, Doreen. (1994) Space, place, and gender*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
**See: Lefebvre, (1958; 1992) Henri. The Social Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell.

Land use is one of the more fascinating and confounding aspects of the history of Pine Mountain Settlement School. In the archival record, land use is recorded by the following: