INDIANA HORTICULTUKAL SOCIETY. 545 



which were in former times mixed with pine. I can not tell you how large 

 that body of land really is because nobody has taken the dimensions of 

 it. 



We have three bodies of forrst land, and the most important from our 

 standpoint is the old pinery lands. This is most important to the State 

 of Michigan. I will not lament about what has happened to all this, 

 but I simply want to tell you that we had immense areas of pinery lands 

 which are practically denuded of timber. Our woodlots are just like your 

 woodlots. They are very thin, because the best has been cut out. They 

 are not producing one-third or one-fourth of what they ought to. The 

 farmers seem to think that they do not care what their ten acres are 

 producing, except for firewood. This means a great deal to the State of 

 Michigan when four million acres of its land is producing only one-fourth 

 of what it should produce. Wood in our part of the country is wood. 

 It is not so in Indiana. We value wood even for firewood, and it 

 produced three dollars on the stump, and if the farmer only gets six 

 bits' worth when he is losing the other part of the three dollars that he 

 ought to get from his acre of land, can't you see what the state is losing? 

 The farmers are losing three million dollars a year. This part, however, 

 has been amply touched, so I sliall not speak of it further. 



The other part of the hardwood lands that I have referred to are the 

 forests that have been culled by the lumbermen of bygone times for what 

 pine there was in it. There are thousands of acres of just this kind of 

 land. But you couldn't tell it if you were not an experienced woodman, 

 for it requires an experienced Avoodman to tell it. You see elm. maple, 

 and basswood, and other varieties of hardwood, very little oak. But 

 by the way this is interesting. You see there a mixed forest of hard- 

 woods, which trees are from eighty to one hundred feet in height, and the 

 difference l)etweeu the hardwood forests and what are known as the 

 pinery lands is so conspicuous that you can follow almost the road in 

 many places when walking from one land to another. These forests which 

 form the second portion of the land today is being cut off by lumbermen 

 at the present time. The lumbermen have refused to sell these lands. 

 They have held them, knowing perfectly well that this timber would come 

 into market and that they would make big money. Just the other day 

 I visited a tract of land north of Rudyard with a man who bought it 

 fifteen years ago who paid for it on the average of about three dollars 

 an acre. He showed me a number of basswood trees that were worth at 

 least four times as much as he paid for a whole acre. That gives an idea 

 of what these men are doing, and they know pei'fectly well what they 

 are doing, too. This land is all right. It will be just like the big hard- 

 wood body which composed our farm country, and it will be cut off 

 by lumber men and sold at from six to ten dollars an acre. Then it will 

 be settled up by the farmers of Michigan. 



35-Agri. 



