FORESTRY PROBLEM OP MICHIGAN. 41 



Winchell, is 56,457 square miles; or in acres, that being the unit most 

 common to the thought of business peoj)le, 36,128,040 acres, besides 

 404,730 acres of land on the islands belonging to the State, located in 

 the Great Lakes. Total acreage 36,533,370. 



The number of small, or inland, lakes is something over 5,000, having a 

 total acreage of 712,864. It may not be an unreasonable guess to say that 

 the area covered by the cities, villages, highways, railroads, and rivers 

 of the State, occupy approximately, 1,500,000 acres; taking this, with 

 Prof. Winchell's estimate of lake area, from the total acreage of the 

 State, leaves 34,320,506 acres, as the approximate area of the State, avail- 

 able for agricultural and forest purposes. 



The pine forests have been by far the most valuable, but the whole 

 State was not covered with pine forests. There are twenty-three counties 

 of the State where there was little or no pine. The approximate acreage 

 of these counties, having no pine of commercial value, is 7,200,000, which, 

 so far as pine forests are concerned, reduces the area of the State to 

 27.120,000 acres. 



Of this 27,120,000 acres, a portion has been brought under cultivation 

 as farms; — mainly, of course, on land formerly covered by hard wood, 

 but some of it land which has grown pine. 



The greater part of the land which was once so rich with its stand 

 of the finest white pine, and Norway, is now waste, and much of it unlit 

 for agriculture, and, so far as we can see now, never will be brought 

 under cultivation. It is only fit for forest. Nature knew that ! But we 

 we were talking about acres. 



Other parts of our 27 million acres were, and much now is, occupied by 

 a stand of hard-wood forest. And from eighteen to twenty million acres 

 of it were in pine. This you will see assumes that from 50 to 55 per cent 

 of the acreage of the entire State was originally pine forest. I ask 

 you to remember this approximate estimate of the pine area when we 

 come to speak of the money values. 



As there are no mountainous regions in either peninsula of the State, 

 there is no appreciable portion of this acreage not available for one 

 of the two uses mentioned. 



In searching for some definite figures to illustrate in outline, the former 

 wealth of the State in its forests, my friend, Mr. Dwight, loaned me a 

 copy of ''The History of the Lumber and Forest Industry of the North- 

 west," compiled by Mr. George W. Hotchkiss, published in 1898. Wher- 

 ever I give figures or estimates of the amounts or kinds of timber cut 

 and marketed, without references I am quoting from Mr. Hotchkiss' 

 book. 



The early settlement of Michigan was along its southern border. 

 The southern counties of Michigan were originally clothed with dense 

 forests of oak, cotton-wood, poplar, black walnut, cherry, bass-wood, 

 maple, birch, sycamore, hickory and elm. with occasional ''oak oi^enings." 

 All statistics, so far as I have been able to find, show that the products 

 of the forest have been the most important factor in building up the in- 

 dustries and wealth of the State, and more wealth has been created 

 for use in industrial development of all kinds from the lumber industries 

 than from any other. If this assertion is not true of all the States in 

 the Union, it certainly is of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and some of 

 the provinces of Canada. 

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