the spelling of Dahle to "Dolly" and thus one such area became known as Dolly Sods. The Dahle family eventually moved on, leaving behind only the Americanized version of their name. Local historian Hu Maxwell described the Dolly Sods area in the Wheeling Intelligencer in 1886: "The top of the mountain is flat, except here and there rugged ridges and huge promontories of rocks rising above the level of the plains, and giving the scene an appearance of distance and mystery that must be witnessed before it can be understood". The logging era The area surrounding Dolly Sods was formerly described as the best spruce-hemlock-black cherry forest in the world, with some enormous trees up to 12 feet in diameter. The huge spruce and hemlock became accessible in 1884 when the West Virginia Central and Pittsburgh Railroad, a predecessor of the Western Maryland Railway, first arrived at nearby Davis, from a junction with the B&O Railroad at Piedmont. In 1899, the Parsons Pulp and Lumber Company (PPLC) established a sawmill at Dobbin on the North Branch Potomac River in Grant County. In 1902, the PPLC installed a new band saw mill on the main stem of Red Creek. The lumber boom town of Laneville soon sprang up around it with a population that peaked at over 300 people.Shay locomotives climbed the temporary railroads into the mountains and backcountry logging camps sprang up throughout the Sods, clearing away the virgin forest to feed the hungry mills. Teams of draft horses dragged all the commercial timber to the nearest tracks. When the timber was exhausted in the sector around one camp, the rails were taken up and reused elsewhere. It was into the mill at Laneville that most of the timber of the southern two thirds of the Sods disappeared. Unfortunately, however, the humus covering the ground dried up when the protective tree cover was removed. Sparks from the locomotives, saw mills and logger's warming fires easily ignited this humus layer and the extensive slash – wood too small to be marketable, such as branches and tree crowns – left behind by loggers. Fires repeatedly ravaged the area in the 1910s, scorching everything right down to the underlying rocks. All insects, worms, salamanders, mice and other burrowing forms of life perished and the area became a desert. The destruction was extraordinary. The complete clearcut of this ecologically fragile area, followed by extensive