156 Wisconsin State Horticultural Society. 



If anybody was interested in growing timber, it should be the 

 great prairie states; he did not believe that Wisconsin ever need 

 be concerned about this question. 



TIMBER CULTURE. 

 By J. S. Stickney, Wauwatosa. 



With lumber for all mechauical uses so abundant and so cheap, 

 we are perhaps justified in using sixty to one hundred thousand 

 feet for buildings, and half or quite as much more for fences on a 

 quarter section farm. Almost the only motive for economy in 

 the use of fuel is to save the labor of preparing it. Seventy to 

 eighty thousand feet of lumber lay under each mile of our rail- 

 roads to be renewed every ten or twelve years. Hundreds of mills 

 are diligently gathering in the choicest oak, shaping it into staves 

 and hurrying it away to distant markets. Much of this oak is 

 the accumulation of three or four hundred years, yet no one 

 counts the little rings that record its age, or stops for a moment 

 to consider where the next four hundred years' supply is coming 

 from. Even the young oaks and hickory are not spared, but cut 

 down in their infancy, and by hundreds of car loads are sent after 

 the staves. Thousands of cords of poplar are ground into pulp, 

 and are shipped to paper and book making New England. A 

 friction match is a little thing, yet one match factory in our state 

 uses annually iu its business about four million fest of lumber. 



In three months more I shall have completed the destruction 

 of one hundred and ten acres of timber ; many of the oaks three 

 hundred years old; and what are the results? Staves enough to 

 furnish a medium sized cooper shop perhaps four months. Ties 

 for perhaps a mile of railroad. Coarse wood to burn two moder- 

 ate kilns of brick, and wood of a better quality sufficient for the 

 wants of perhaps a hundred farmers for a single year: only this 

 and for this brief time ! yet, for the next three hundred years rail- 

 roads must be kept in repair, bricks must be made, dwellings 

 must be warmed and food cooked. Thus the ball rolls on, and 

 we freely use the good things of to-day troubling ourselves with 

 very little thought of the future. 



