were alarmed at the abusive logging practices that were stripping bare the Black Mountains. After the North Carolina state legislature rejected an initial attempt to create a state park at the summit of Mount Mitchell in 1913, Craig began negotiating with (and may have threatened) Perley and Crockett to preserve the forest atop Mitchell while he and Holmes lobbied for the creation of a state park. The state legislature finally approved the purchase of a stretch of land between Stepps Gap and the summit of what is now Big Tom in 1915, which became the core of Mount Mitchell State Park. The Pisgah National Forest, established in 1916, also began buying up and replanting lands that had been logged over. In 1922, the Mount Mitchell Development Company (which had been formed by Fred Perley, a partner in Perley and Crockett) completed the first automobile road to Mount Mitchell, connecting the summit with the Swannanoa Valley. Adolphus and Ewart Wilson (the son and grandson of "Big Tom" Wilson) completed a road connecting the Cane River Valley with the summit of Mitchell shortly thereafter. The state eventually condemned the Wilsons' road, but allowed Ewart Wilson to operate an inn at Stepps Gap until the early 1960s. NC-128, which connects Mount Mitchell with the Blue Ridge Parkway, was completed in 1948. Environmental threats The Black Mountains, like many other ranges in the Appalachians, are currently threatened by acid rain and air pollution. Much of the range's once-famous red spruce and Fraser fir trees are dead or dying due in part to the pollution. A more significant threat to the firs, however, is the balsam woolly adelgid, an insect which may have an easier time killing the firs than it normally would due to them being weakened by the acid rain. In some recent studies, individual Fraser fir trees which are resistant to the adelgid have been found, lending hope to the possibility that these will again repopulate a healthy, mature fir forest at the mountains' highest elevations. At lower elevations of the Black Mountains, eastern and Carolina hemlock trees grow on moist slopes near streams (a National Forest recreation area on the Toe River at the base of Mount Mitchell is called "Carolina Hemlocks" for this reason). These too are under attack by an introduced pest, the hemlock woolly adelgid. Arriving only in the last few growing seasons, the health of the hemlocks