FORESTRY IN DIXIE 



IF HORACE GREELEY had been a forester and had 

 lived in 1919, his famous advice to the young Ameri- 

 can would have been "Go South, young man, go 

 South !" and to the young Southerner, "Stay South, 

 young man. Stay South !" For if ever there was a field 

 and an opportunity for the ambitious forester, it is in 

 the old South, from Virginia and Missouri to Florida and 

 Texas. Not only is there a field for the forester, but 

 more important yet, there is a wonderfully wide field 

 for forestry. While the East, under compulsion of a 

 real dearth of local timber supplies, has for fifteen years 

 been practicing at least the rudiments of forestry ; and 

 while the West, under government ownership of im- 

 mense bodies of timbered land, and under the scourge 

 of timber-destroying fires, has for as long, or longer, 

 studied the problems of forest conservation and applied 

 their solutions, the Southeast has, with a few notable 

 exceptions, not yet awakened to the need for forestry. 

 But the South 

 will not long 

 remain blind 

 to this great 

 movement, and 

 can already 

 point with 

 pride to 1,837,- 

 000 acres of 

 National For- 

 ests, in Vir- 

 gir^ia. North 

 Carolina South 

 Carolina, Geor- 

 gia, Alabama, 

 Florida, Ten- 

 nessee and Ar- 

 k a n s a s ; to 

 state forestry 

 d e p a r tments 

 and forestry 

 associations in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, 

 Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas ; and to instruction in 

 forestry in the state colleges of North Carolina, Georgia, 

 Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas. But with no 

 state forestry department in eight Southern States, South 

 Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, 

 Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, and a total forestry 

 appropriation in the six named states now having depart- 

 ments of but $42,900 in 1918, there is presented to the 

 thoughtful Southerner a pressing need for increased 

 effort and a determined campaign for forestry legisla- 

 tion, study and action. 



Never can there be a more propitious time for push- 

 ing forestry in the South. In recent years a great 

 awakening has taken place to the vast acreages of waste 

 and idle land — cut-over and swamp-land — that lie within 

 the boundaries of the Southern States. Beginning with 



the Cut-over Land Conference of the South, held in New 

 Orleans in April, 1917, a powerful movement has gained 

 headway, constantly looking to the development of the 

 South's greatest single asset, her warm and fertile soils. 

 It is but natural that in this development the greatest 

 prominence has been given to those uses of the soil, 

 farming and grazing, that promise an immediate cash 

 return. There has been a natural tendency, in the first 

 flush of their enthusiasm over their newly discovered 

 asset, for Southern land owners to class all their cut- 

 over lands together as valuable farming soils, and in 

 the absence of anyone to tell them differently to look 

 upon the possibilities of tree growing as too unremuner- 

 ative to be worth consideration. Now is the time for the 

 forester to come forward and show the owner of young 

 second-growth timber the value of his property, to 

 point out to him how fast it is growing, how valuable it 

 will shortly be, how simple a thing it is in the South 



to renew our 

 fast-disappear- 

 i n g forests. 

 Now is the 

 time, before 

 the land specu- 

 lator can get 

 in his deadly 

 work on a 

 large scale, for 

 the forester to 

 ]iresent and 

 l)ush his pro- 

 gram of land 

 c 1 a s sification 

 a n d thereby 

 effectively pre- 

 vent the repe- 

 tition of that 

 great economic 

 and social 

 tragedy which elsewhere has followed attempted agri- 

 cultural development of land that never should have 

 been farmed. Now is the time for the forester to link 

 together in the public mind fire protection for improve- 

 ment of the range and enrichment of the soil, and fire 

 protection for the encouragement of second growth. 



The conference of Southern foresters held at Jack- 

 sonville, Florida, on January 3rd and 4th, with a field 

 trip on January 5th, brought out all of the above men- 

 tioned points. That meeting, engineered in part by the 

 Louisiana Department of Conservation (as was last 

 year's meeting at New Orleans, the first meeting ever 

 held in the far South of professional foresters), and in 

 part by Sydney L. Moore of the Sizer Timber Company, 

 of Jacksonville, and Austin Gary, of the United States 

 Forest Service, was remarkable by reason of three 

 things : First, the attendance of the state foresters of 



SOME OF THE FORESTERS WHO ATTENDED THE BIG MEETING AT JACKSONVILLE 



861 



