The first thing one sees on arriving at the main parking area for the Dugger Mountain Wilderness — 9,220 acres mandated by law to be free of man-made structures — is a house.

To be fair, the ramshackle cabin and its surrounding cluster of buildings — barn, henhouse, corncrib — sit a few hundred yards south of the wilderness’ boundary. It was the home of the late Pink Edward Burns.

Burns was the last man to live on the patch of what is now national forest land, hunting and trapping much of what he needed to survive. He died in 1999.

The vast tract surrounding Alabama’s second-highest peak is far from deserted, though. People wander into the woods, most along the eight-and-a-half-mile arc of the 137-mile Pinhoti Trail through the wilderness and up Dugger’s stony slopes. Some carry rifles and, like Burns, are looking for food. Others haul just a pack, seeking ridge-top views.

Burns, of course, was far from the first person to trod those hillsides. He may have been the last man to make his living off those steep, forested hillsides, but he was just the latest in a history of humans going back thousands of years.

Botanist Francine Hutchinson worked with her husband, Bruce, to have the area declared a Wilderness Area, and is now a teacher at Jacksonville High School. She said old stories tell of permanent American Indian villages in the area when white settlers arrived in the 1820s and 1830s.

The settlers were pushing into land that had been occupied by the Creeks and Cherokees and their ancestors for centuries.

Hutchinson said the land that is now the Dugger Wilderness was too steep and rocky for agriculture. That’s evident today just a few hundred yards’ hike north from Burns’ cabin. The Pinhoti marches straight up the slope of Red Mountain, climbing about 400 feet in a third of a mile.

Indians farmed in villages in the wider valleys to the south — an area known today as Rabbittown. Harry Holstein, director of Jacksonville State University’s Archeological Resource Lab, says there’s a site nearby that he believes supported a village beginning around 8,000 B.C. Indians in the area may have used the slopes around Dugger for hunting and gathering, Hutchinson said.

Chris Hill thinks there’s evidence they were there. In 1996, Hill, then an archeologist with JSU, surveyed the area as part of the groundwork for its declaration as a wilderness zone. On Dugger’s slopes he found stone mounds not unlike those that dot nearby ridges at McClellan.

“They’re sort of an enigma to archeologists,” said Hill, now a teacher at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School. “They’re just these piles of rock. You never know what you’re going to find under the rocks until you excavate them. These have never been excavated.”

Similar structures elsewhere are believed to be burial mounds.

“Some excavated nearby have revealed nothing,” Hill said.

He speculated that some of the piles could be personal ceremonial mounds, marking young men’s coming of age. Some could be directional markers, signposts pointing the way for foot travelers, he said.

“That would be neat if we found that they were traveling close to the Pinhoti,” Hill said.

As whites moved in, the Indians eventually were pushed out, forced west of the Mississippi River on the Trail of Tears. Settlers founded Rabbittown Baptist Church in 1836.

Whites began farming the same land the natives had farmed, and may have found occasion, too, to wander up the forested slopes. They would have seen a far different landscape than that which greets hikers today.

Hutchinson said the forest then was dominated by American chestnuts. The thick-trunked trees, at 80-100 feet tall, were known as the “redwoods of the East,” she said. Beginning in the early 1900s blight imported with Asian chestnuts decimated the American trees throughout their range that stretched up and down the East Coast. By the middle of the 20th Century, the American chestnuts were all but gone.

Hutchinson said the tall trees’ massive canopy made for a wide-open forest floor, with room to run. Hikers today most often stick to trails, in part because of the shrubs and small trees that thrive in the chestnuts’ absence.

“The forests we have now are a pitiful remnant,” she said. “It’s a ghost of its former self.”

Also gnawing away at the forest were people — logging for timber to build ships, furniture, houses and to stoke the fires of industry and domestic life.

Dugger’s steep slopes may have saved it from the worst of the logging, but Hutchinson says she wouldn’t call it virgin forest.

In sheltered saddles just shy of the peak, where the Pinhoti crosses between ridgelines, there’s a hint of what the forest might once have been like, with tall, straight trunks, a canopy far overhead and open space below.

The settlers’ descendants made their own piles of rock, though with different motives than the Creeks and Cherokee. Not far into the woods behind Burns’ cabin is the remains of an old mining site, where workers sought ore for landowner W.I. Greenleaf. Not far from the trail and the cabin is a concrete foundation and some steps, all that remains of a house that may have been built by Greenleaf, for himself or his workers.

It may have been mine workers who laid the first logs for what became a schoolhouse, and later the home of Burns’ parents, and then his own. Expanded in stages over the years, cabin’s first logs likely were cut not far from where the house now stands.

Hutchinson’s guess on the type of tree the logs were cut from?

Chestnut.

Coming next week:

On the trail with one of Alabama’s storied birds