Cherry Grove, West Virginia is an isolated place. It is forty-five minutes from the nearest stoplight, an hour and a half from the nearest interstate, and three hours from the nearest airport. The local paper is filled with articles about quilt club meetings, church dinners, and the results of the latest race to extirpate coyotes. Change is slow here, to the point that many don’t even recognizing that it’s happening. When big things do happen, they became local lore that are passed down for years. Case in point, the story of Fanny Bennett. Bennett lived in Cherry Grove in a frame house until a fire claimed it in the 1960s. Within a few hours, the house and nearly all of its contents had been reduced to ashes. A small square of human flesh purportedly found among the rubble lead some to speculate that Bennett had burned along with the house. Whatever her fate, Bennett was never seen by her family again.

This was only the beginning of the Fanny Bennett mystery. A news story aired shortly after the fire reporting that a woman’s body had been found in a creek in another part of the state. The photo that circulated in the papers and on TV resembled Bennett, but the woman’s identity was never confirmed. A third possibility holds that Bennett ended up in the town of Weston, two hours away, where she owned a plot of land. A headstone in Franklin, another nearby town, bears her name, but no one alive is certain whether or not her body lies beneath it.

The final lead emerged in the form of a young boy, claiming to have seen two cars outside of Bennett’s house the night it burned down. One of the cars he described matched a car owned by the lawyer who recently drew up Bennett’s will. The other matched a car owned by a man whom Bennett barely knew, yet had willed most of her belongings to. The unknown boy and his tantalizing story were greeted with suspicion. He never returned, nor did any hope of solving the mystery of Bennett’s final days.
Among the possessions Bennett left behind was a 65 acre tract of land on the side of Spruce Knob, the highest point in West Virginia at 4,863 feet above sea level. A nameless creek flows through the property until it reaches Sawmill Run, one of the many finger streams that rush down the Appalachian Mountains to form the Potomac River. The parcel of land is unique because it contains some of the oldest and largest Eastern Hemlock trees in the state. Thanks to Bennett’s legendary tenacity, these trees were preserved when the rest of the area was clear cut in the early 20th century.

According to a family member, Bennett was a cruel and territorial woman. She guarded her property closely with guns and dogs and threatened to call the police on anyone who trespassed. This behavior didn’t earn her many friends, but it did succeed in preserving the small remnant of old growth forest, now known as the Fanny Bennett Hemlock Grove. After Bennett’s disappearance, the grove fell into the hands of her lawyer. In 1966 it was acquired by The Nature Conservancy, who then transferred it to the U.S. Forest Service.

Today, a small wooden sign along the gravel road up to Spruce Knob marks the location of the grove. I must’ve driven past the sign a hundred times before I finally wandered into the woods behind it one brisk afternoon in mid-December. I had been laying low for the winter in a small cabin farther up the mountain. After a few days of tethering myself to the warmth of the woodstove, the cold air finally stoked my wanderlust. I bundled up, hiked out to the road where my car had been sitting idle for the past month, scraped away the ice and snow, and drove down to the small pull-off across the road from the peeling wooden sign.

The hemlocks in the Fanny Bennett Grove are not as large as they are in other old growth patches in West Virginia, but they are by far the largest evergreens in the area. The biggest trees line the creeks with a few more behemoths climbing the hill. I measured some of their circumferences at between two and three meters and diameters at as much as one meter. More startling than their size was the fact that all of the trees were dead or dying. On this late autumn day, the moribund forest was as dark and intriguing as Fanny Bennett herself.

The Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga Canadensis) of the Fanny Bennett Grove are being wiped out by the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (HWA), an invasive species originally from Asia. According to the National Park Service, the HWA preys on both Eastern and Carolina Hemlocks. An infested tree has what looks like miniature cotton balls at the bases of its needles. The parasite disrupts the nutrient flow by feeding on the sap and starves a tree to death within 3 to 5 years.

The HWA migrated from Asia to the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s and reached the eastern woodlands by the early 1950s. Since then it has spread through much of the Eastern U.S., from southern Maine to Northern Alabama, including nearly all of the mountainous counties of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and the entire Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Cathedral State Park, home to the best known stand of old growth Eastern Hemlocks in West Virginia, has seen many of its 200-300 year old trees die off in recent years.
The HWA’s only predator in the east is cold weather. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), the insects’ population is reduced by low winter temperatures and short cold snaps. Winter temperatures in the Appalachian region have shown a warming trend in recent years, which does not bode well for hemlocks. Pennsylvania’s DCNR concedes that “eradication is not the objective, because hemlock woolly adelgid is already firmly established in our state.” According to the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid Action Team, a group of scientists and land managers, HWA spreads at a rate of about 20 miles per year.

The HWA is dealing Fanny Bennett’s Hemlocks the deathblow that the lumber companies never could. Other old growth stands throughout Central and Southern Appalachia are up against the same fate. There is a lesson to be learned though from this patch of damp woods in the heart of Appalachia, where landscape and legend are so tightly interlocked. The key to conservation is the audacity and persistence of individuals like Bennett. We can only hope that her legend outlives her hemlocks.