What good was a high windswept ridge beyond its obvious scenic beauty? Dr. Carl Schenck, who managed 80,000 acres of George W. Vanderbilt's Pisgah Forest between 1895 and 1909, tried raising livestock! In 1902, Schenck spent $25 on a goat fence on Looking Glass Rock. That year, raising livestock in pastures where trees wouldn't grow returned a profit of $700. By 1905, 300 acres of sheep pasture sat atop the rock.
Timber, however, remained the major source of revenue for Pisgah Forest. Trees were valued at fifty cents per 1,000 board feet. Between 1896 and 1897 Tom Morrow, an old lumberman employed at the Biltmore Estate, estimated that the forests bordering Looking Glass Creek contained 7,942 marketable tulip poplars. Forest included railroad ties, shingles, and tanbark, used for tanning leather.
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It's a Pluton!
The sheer cliffs of Looking Glass Rock formed about 470 million years ago when pulses of molten magma intruded into surrounding rock. Over time the magma hardened into granite. Pressure and heat then slowly altered the rock to form granitic gneiss. Eons have eroded the softer overlying rock exposing the sheer cliffs you see today. Water flowing over the cliffs creates a mirror-like effect when illuminated by the sun giving viewers in the distance the impression that the cliffs are a looking glass.
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