152 Wisconsin State Horticultural Society. 



have borne nuts for many years. A few years ago he went back 

 to where these trees were standing and gathered nuts and planted 

 them, and now the second generation is bearing. They make fine 

 ornamental and nut bearing trees, but will not make much tim- 

 ber. Parts of them would do for veneering or something of that 

 kind, but are nothing like the old original trees, which would cut 

 four and five saw-logs. The gentleman says plant timber on the 

 poor land, but his experience had been that the best timber grew 

 on the best land. Sandy land will bear pine that can be used for 

 lumber, but the better the land the better the pine. Living as he 

 did in the thickly timbered region, the paradise for farming 

 seemed to him to be the prairie, where the land can be easily 

 tilled, and settled in a short time, and where groves for shelter 

 and for firewood can be easily raised in a few years. 



Mr. Theobold, of Iowa county, said his experience corresponded 

 with that of Mr. Wood. When he was a small boy, his father 

 commenced on a farm in the thick woods ; there he spent his boy- 

 hood days in clearing up a farm, but when he grew up, he started 

 out for the prairie3 of the west, and never had had occasion to re- 

 gret the change. In those early days, settlers were afraid to locate 

 out on the open prairies, away from wood and water, so he settled 

 in the openings, but believed he would have done better to have 

 located out on the open prairie, as is proved by the experience of 

 those who came later and settled there. These openings have 

 grown up, or are rapidly growing up, with fine oaks and poplars, so 

 that there is now a much larger amount of wood and timber in that 

 section than when the country was first settled. It is surprising 

 how rapidly the young timber has come in and grown, since the 

 fires have been kept from running over the openings and prairies. 

 He believed as firmly as anyone, that we should protect this young 

 timber, both for our own use and for those that come after us. If 

 this was done, he did not believe there would b3 any scarcity of 

 timber. To show the rapidity of its growth when thus protected, 

 he said that he now owned forty acres which thirty-three years ago 

 was heavy timbered land, and he and his neighbors cut it off en- 

 tirely, but it now had at least fifty cords of wood on every acre 

 of it 



