7. WEST FLORIDA PINE HILLS. 239 



only 3.6% of the area was cleared; so there is still ample 

 room for "development." Excluding the city of Pensacola, which 

 has a splendid harbor and has been built up mostly by foreign trade, 

 and is therefore to a considerable extent independent of the natural 

 resources of the country near it, this region had in 1910 about 13.3 

 inhabitants to the square mile; which was an increase of 51% 

 in ten years, a rate far above the average. About 62^ of the 

 inhabitants are white. 



The lumber industry of this region reached large proportions 

 early in the state's history. From an article by Hon. P. K. Yonge, 

 of Pensacola, in "Makers of America, Florida edition" (Atlan.a, 

 1909), we learn that there v/ere a few sawmills near Pensacola in 

 the i8th century, and that in 1835 Pensacola exported nearly four 

 million feet of lumber, and in 1855 about eighteen million feet. This 

 was of course nearly all long-leaf pine. (Some of it may have been 

 rafted down the rivers from Alabama, but even sa, it could have 

 come from the same kind of country.) By 1884 the to;al exports 

 were over ten times as much as in 1855, to say nothmg of coastwise 

 raid rail shipments. About this time some apprehension for the 

 permanence of the supply began to be felt. Dr. Charles Mohr, of 

 Mobile, in his day the greatest authority on the forests of the Gulf 

 states, wrote as follows in the 9th volume of the Tenth Census (pp. 

 522, 523), published in 1884: 



The district between the Choctawhatchee and the Perdido is the seat 

 of the oldest and most active lumbering industry of the whole Gu^f. coast 

 * * * The better class of the somewhat elevated and undulating 

 timberlands which surround Escambia, Blackwater, and Saint Mary de 

 Ga'.ves bay were long since stripped of their valuable timber. These forests, 

 having been culled time after time during the last quarter of a century, are 

 now completely exhausted. The low, wet pine barrens, with their soil 

 of almost pure sand, which trend eastward along the shores of Santa Rosa 

 sound and Choctawhatchee bay, have never borne a growth of pine suffi- 

 ciet'y large to furnish more than a small supplj^ of timber of very inferior 

 quality. The ridges between the Choctawhatchee river and the Yellow 

 river are also, for the most part, arid, sandy wastes, never yielding more 

 than a few hundred feet of lumber per acre. 



The wel'-timbered portion of west Florida commences with the southern 

 border of Holmes county. This region is now, however, near'y exhausted 

 ailong water-courses large enough for rafting, while of late years canals 

 and ditches dug into the forest afford facilities for floating timber growing 

 remote from streams to the mills. According to those best informed re- 

 garding the amount of timber still standing in this section, there is scarcely 

 enough left between the Escambia and Choctawhatchee riv.-r?:. in western 

 Florida, to keep the mills on the coast supplied for another ha'.f-do/.en 

 years, even if the whole of the pine standing could be made available. 



