Department of Environment and Conservation

The Clebsch Legacy and Wild Tennessee

by Bob Fulcher

The Prairie Cafe, humped on the shoulder of Highway 41 just south of Manchester, must have appeared like an interesting adventure to three sweaty tramps on the Fourth of July, 1947. Those were the days when every roadside plate-lunch emporium offered promise: home-made cornbread, home-made pie, home-made everything in large helpings for a very fair price.

The three travellers had been on the road for days, camping on unclaimed corners of wood lots and church yards, motoring in a triple-axled, just-surplused WWII vehicle they called "the Green Elephant." Each had $1.50 a day to spend for food, and that was plenty.

After they had eaten all they wanted, and had queued up at the cash register, the group's leader, Jack Sharp, asked the man behind the counter, "Why is this called the Prairie Cafe?"

"Because of that prairie over there," the man said, flatly, and pointed further south down the road.

If that question had ever been asked before, the inquirer must have shrugged at such a matter-of-fact answer. This group, however, did not. A.J. Sharp, already established as the authority on the flora of the Great Smoky Mountains, and as a world-class rare plant hunter, had been brought up on prairie ecology at Ohio State University. Prairies were familiar, too, to his companions, Alfred Clebsch, one of Tennessee's most accomplished and fascinating "non-professional" naturalists, and his 17-year-old son, Eddy. Their Montgomery County home area was dotted with relic open sites persisting since the days when the region was known as The Barrens.

The three men quickly filed down the highway, pushed past the screening trees and shrubs at the road side, and stepped into May Prairie. Big Bluestem grass reached up, head high. Little Bluestem, Indian Grass, and Switch Grass blanketed the field. Latin names began flying among the sweat bees and rare orchids. Prairie names. The party had just started.

The 80-acre site would yield a trove of new state records (the first discovery of a plant species within a state boundary), become a State Natural Area, and remain the most complete and impressive, hands-down-finest association of prairie plants surviving in the Southeast. For Ed Clebsch, spending his first summer in a paid position as a botanical field worker, it was a discovery of enduring excitement. For the Clebsch clan of Tennessee, small in number, add one more star in their hefty crown of accomplishments in conservation, education, research, and exploration regarding the natural treasures of Tennessee and the world beyond.

In 1914, Alfred Clebsch, of Bremen, Germany, had ventured to Clarksville, Tennessee, the source of tobacco for his father's import business, for a look at the New World. Upon his return trip at sea, hostilities broke out between Germany and Great Britain. His ship's captain was ordered to seek the closest neutral port, and, as New York City happened to be 10 miles closer than Lisbon, Portugal, Alfred wound up spending the war and the rest of his life in the United States. Without much knowledge of the country, he retreated to the only place in America with which he was familiar, Clarksville, Tennessee.

The Cumberland River town faintly showed the trappings of its big neighbor upstream, Nashville. It had a modest college campus, and an interesting community of educated residents, even some other Europeans. Alfred took up partnership in tobacco warehouse management, married a local girl, and soon had a family with three sons. When a doctor advised Alfred that one of his boys suffered from "nervousness" and might find improvement through healthful outdoor activity, Alfred launched into Scouting. When he perceived militaristic trends within the Boy Scouts of America, he and his sons withdrew from that activity (though he would later return to Scouting,) and directed his boys toward a serious and thorough pursuit of bird study.

In 1936, the Tennessee Ornithological Society's quarterly, The Migrant, reported, "An active branch of the T.O.S. was organized [in Clarksville] this spring, largely through the enterprise of our first Clarksville member, Mr. Alfred Clebsch, Sr." Alfred immediately began contributing reports and articles to the journal, and was soon serving as Secretary-Treasurer, a position he held for almost 10 years.

He developed a very close association with Albert Ganier, the T.O.S.'s most distinguished member. With Ganier, he was the last Tennessean to see the Golden Eagle nesting in the state, at a site in Van Buren County in 1940. Those rambles resulted in Ganier and Clebsch's publication, "Summer Birds of Fall Creek Falls State Park." They likewise collaborated in the field work and publication of important early surveys of birds at Roan Mountain, Pickett State Park and Forest, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Clebsch, with his sons, with Ganier, or with his neighbor, Dr. Charles F. Pickering, spotted valuable records of birds in upland swamps, river bottoms, and mountains tops across Middle and East Tennessee: the first nesting record for Swainson's Warbler in Middle Tennessee; the southern-most nesting record for the Red Breasted Nuthatch; the first documentation of an overwintering Catbird in Tennessee.

He could be justifiably proud of the boys, too. His oldest son, Alfred, Jr., was a member of an expert team hired by the Department of Conservation in 1939 to conduct the first wildlife survey of the Hatchie River watershed. Each of three summers from 1944-1946, Ganier, Alfred, Sr., and his youngest son, Ed Clebsch, camped in the Unicoi Mountains on the Tennessee-North Carolina border, east of Cleveland, Tennessee, taking notes and occasionally taking specimens with the shotgun and meticulously preparing study skins, the conventional method of collecting data since the days of Audubon. Alfred wrote:

"On arrival, we pitched our tent in a little spot of open meadow by a clear mountain stream, cleaned out the spring in the nearby rhododendron "jungle," built a cooking grill with a stone smokestack, made our pallets on a bed of dry beech leaves, and soon found ourselves comfortable enough for the purpose at hand... The third member of our party was Edward Clebsch, 15, our frequent partner of bird trips -- at once tireless, observant, and generally useful." Ed had been observant enough that, at age six, he had been accepted as the youngest member in T.O.S. history.

The field trips of Clarksville chapter of the T.O.S. were soon joined by another interesting resident, Royal Shanks, a Ph.D.-carrying botanist from Ohio State in search of like-minded naturalists. He convinced Alfred Clebsch, Sr. that the empty moments during birding trips could be most usefully disposed through collecting and observing plant life. Apparently with some notion of Clebsch's capacity for thoroughness and detail, he suggested the mosses would be an ideal area for study. Alfred Clebsch proceeded to become Middle Tennessee's leading expert on mosses, and the Austin Peay State University herbarium still holds his great collection, which also includes later important records of flowering plants. Approaching age 80, Alfred authored "The Bryophytes of Land Between the Lakes," for the distinguished botanical journal, Castanea.

Ed Clebsch, too, had a knack for botany, and Shanks became his mentor. Studying Tennessee plants, especially moss, inevitably meant correspondence with Jack Sharp, the University of Tennessee's great botanist and bryologist. After Royal Shanks joined Sharp on the U.T. faculty, with a firm faith, he invited his protege, Ed Clebsch, to move to Knoxville to assist in the process of rebuilding the university's herbarium collection, which had been utterly destroyed by fire in 1934.

Shanks, Sharp, and Ed Clebsch, in the first four years covering the project (1947-1951), managed a remarkable amount of border-to-border documentation, discovering, as Ed remembers, "state records out the wazoo," including the May Prairie finds. Their first trip took them to Big South Fork, where they discovered a huge population of Cumberland Rosemary on Big Island near No Business Creek, on past Pickett State Park, where Ed received his first scorpion bite, and then to Cumberland Mountain State Park, where they worked until dawn pressing plants, and giving young Ed some concerns about his new life style. The next day they explored Fall Creek Falls State Park, locating an unusually large, uninfected American Chestnut tree. Whether it had any special genetic resistance to the blight was never determined -- it was cut down when the road was "improved" a few years later.

On a typical evening they set up their curious plant processing apparatus, which Sharp had perfected while collecting in the mountains of Mexico, a hinged, collapsible, 15-foot-long rack, which allowed the specimens to be adequately dried overnight by heat from kerosene lanterns. The night of the May Prairie discovery, camped at an abandoned gas station, they dried and labelled, as best they could, over 400 specimens.

Through the guidance of Shanks, Ed pursued undergraduate and master's degree in botany at the University of Tennessee, and a doctorate at Duke. His graduate research projects focused on Alaskan ecology, though the grass examined in his dissertation, Tricatum spicatum, was also known from Roan Mountain at the turn of the century. After Royal Shanks tragic drowning in 1962, the University of Tennessee offered his position to his best student, Ed Clebsch. Jack Sharp remained a great professional influence, and, eventually, became his father-in-law for 17 years.

Ed has worked on many fronts since that time. For the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, he has conducted research to preserve endangered species like the Tennessee Coneflower in the cedar glades and Ruth's Golden Aster in the river gorges of the Ocoee and Hiwassee. He has been more inclined to brag on the work of his students, and he has directed graduate research into a mind-stretching spectrum of problems and projects: the distribution and ecology of the remnant patches of Northern White Cedar (a tree of Canadian forests that has left its southern-most member hanging on a sheer cliff face at Fall Creek Falls State Park); the reproductive biology of Cumberland Rosemary; earthworm biogeography; catfish behavior; characteristics of users of the Appalachian Trail; the biophysics of photosynthesis.

Clebsch has taken up conservation issues, testifying at the Tellico Dam hearings to the inadequacy of the TVA draft environmental impact statement, rewriting the original draft of the State Natural Areas Act, coordinating the first Earth Day for the University of Tennessee, and providing strong advocacy for the establishment of the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area and the Obed National Scenic River as an active, founding member of the Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning.

He found great satisfaction, as well, through his work as coordinator of the Great Smoky Mountains Wildflower Pilgrimage for almost 30 years, the first and largest event of its kind in the world, and much imitated in recent decades. During Ed's tenure the event reached its greatest proportions, drawing up to 1500 registrants for field outings. A spin off of the event, the Smoky Mountain Field School, developed through U.T.'s non-credit program with the National Park Service, and also drew on Ed's leadership.

He and his wife, Meredith, are now pushing into another Tennessee frontier, the propagation and cultivation of mysterious and wild woodland plants. Their native plant nursery in Greenback, Tennessee, named Native Gardens, is filling up the state with gorgeous blossoms and regal ferns, and teaching others alternatives to digging plants from the woods. In their 14th year of business, they have been able to offer over 200 species of native beauties, all grown from seeds, spores, or cuttings.

Ed also has the pleasure in these years of watching his children accomplish great things in the Clebsch tradition. His son, Hans, has held membership in professional orchestras around the globe. His daughter, Julia, has been working at a National Park Service historic site in California, and is currently in a select ranger training program. And his oldest daughter, Leise, whose professional career began as a naturalist at Norris Dam and Falls Creek Falls state parks, is an 11-year veteran of the US Forest Service, and a principle author of the wilderness plan for Sawtooth National Recreation Area near Ketchum, Idaho.

In short, the Clebschs have covered so much of wild Tennessee, their track ought to be in the field guides.

If you haven't had a Clebsch experience, just head for a pretty place outdoors -- mountain, prairie, or swamp. It won't be long until you run into a Clebsch discovery or a Clebsch student. Or the real thing. It's as certain as the flowers in May.

(Bob Fulcher is a park interpretive specialist with Tennessee State Parks. He lived in a sinkhole in the "U.T. Woodlot" during his senior year in college under the academic counsel of Dr. Ed Clebsch.)

Ed Clebsch Speaks "The point that watersheds, not stream channels, are the units of ecological integrity, has been made repeatedly. It deserves emphasis in the case of the Big South Fork. Entire watersheds of some tributary streams must have protection if the streams are to continue to have their characteristic floras and faunas.

"What good is protection of the channel and line of sight limits of the gorge on such a superlative stream as North White Oak Creek if the town of Jamestown or one of its coming industrial plants pollutes a small side stream so badly that the main North White Oak Creek is affected throughout its length?

"What good are the Big South Fork and the lower reaches of the New River as wild or scenic streams if, in the future, the New River headwaters are so polluted from strip mines that vertebrates are killed and the water becomes acid enough to etch metal? This wild and noble and remote country is a greater resource to the nation in a state of wildness, nobility and remoteness than it is in any condition brought on by man!"

-Ed Clebsch's testimony to a Congressional committee during hearings regarding the status of the Obed River in the 1970s.

Updated August 13, 1997; Send comments to Department of Environment and Conservation.