Dr. Carl Schenck, who managed 80,000 acres of George W. Vanderbilt's Pisgah Forest between 1895 and 1909, used Looking Glass Rock for more than scenery by trying to raise livestock on its high windswept ridge. In 1902, he spent $25 on a goat fence there, and that year livestock raised in pastures where trees would not grow returned a profit of $700. By 1905, 300 acres of sheep pasture lay atop the rock. Timber remained Pisgah Forest's major source of revenue, with trees 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 products also included railroad ties, shingles, and tanbark for tanning leather. The sheer cliffs of Looking Glass Rock formed about 470 million years ago when pulses of molten magma intruded into surrounding rock, hardened into granite, and were later altered by pressure and heat into granitic gneiss; erosion then exposed the cliffs, and water flowing over them creates a mirror-like effect in sunlight that gives the rock its name.