Near this point the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike crossed the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River and passed over Cheat Mountain at White Top, a high point of almost 4000 feet. The Shavers Fork forms a high-elevation watershed atop Cheat Mountain, making it the highest large stream in the East. Its cool temperatures and heavy precipitation support a red spruce-dominated ecosystem more like forests of Canada than the central Appalachians, and these forests and cold-water tributaries once provided habitat for now rare species and native brook trout. After a half century of wholesale logging, the red spruce forests and the river have rebounded, and the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River is now the largest block of red spruce forest south of the Adirondacks and premier habitat for the rare West Virginia northern flying squirrel and the Cheat Mountain salamander. Just west, the Civil War fort at Cheat Summit stood atop the mountain, where soldiers endured harsh weather that helped keep the area largely unsettled and remote, and Ambrose Bierce wrote of the mountain "with its shaggy pelt of spruce and firs." The size and richness of the red spruce forests drew commercial investors in the 1880s, and from 1880 through the 1980s logging, fires, railroad building, and mining severely affected the area, though much of it is now publicly owned. The first Cheat Bridge here, contracted in 1841 with builder Francis O’Neal, was a 112-foot truss covered bridge without arches, built of local red spruce timber with pins of seasoned locust or white oak. A logging town boomed here from about 1890 through the 1920s but has since vanished.