The 1960s were the heyday for fire towers in the Cherokee National Forest, where the Oswald Dome Fire Tower was one of 17 towers used to spot fires. Built in 1935, it originally stood 79 feet 6 inches high on Bean Mountain, about 10.5 miles from this site. Fire towers were staffed by one or more lookouts equipped with binoculars and radios, and they used an alidade or azimuth reader to determine fire locations by triangulating smoke sightings with towermen in adjacent locations. In the southeastern U.S., few fires occurred until Euro-American settlement began in the 1800s, when settlers cleared and burned land for cultivation and grazing, producing slow, low fires that favored fire-tolerant species such as shortleaf pine and hickory over fire-intolerant species such as red maple, rhododendron, and black gum, changing the landscape. At the dawn of the 20th century, growing awareness of the danger of large wildfires led the Forest Service in 1935, after devastating fires in the Lake States, New York, Maine, and across the West killed nearly 2,000 people and burned millions of acres, to enact the 10:00 a.m. rule, directing rangers to extinguish all fires by the morning after detection regardless of conditions. After many decades of fire suppression, some forest ecosystems changed significantly as trees grew extremely dense, competition for sunlight and water increased, insects and disease thrived on stressed trees, and dead trees accumulated. Foresters use prescribed fire under specific weather and fuel conditions to reduce dead and down trees and branches, thin vegetation, lower surface fuels, lessen the severity of future wildfire, and improve timber, wildlife habitat, and forest sustainability. Prescribed fire can also reduce fuel loads, increase soil productivity by releasing and recycling nutrients, generate new growth and greater diversity of plant and animal habitats, increase browse for wildlife, and return vegetation from mature forest to earlier stages such as grass and shrubs, promoting diversity where fire is part of the ecosystem. Fire towers remained an important Forest Service resource because lookouts could see several miles in a 360 degree view, but as equipment and technology improved, aircraft detection became more common, regular tower staffing in the Cherokee National Forest ended by the late 1980s, and the Oswald Dome Fire Tower was disassembled and removed from its original location in 2003 before a segment of the structure and its cab were restored and relocated to this site in 2004.