FORESTS IN MASSACHUSETTS. 259 



comparatively worthless for employment in the arts, and 

 which only supply, after years of struggling growth, an 

 inferior fuel. 



The most valuable trees have always been cut, often before 

 they reached maturity, and as no steps have been taken to 

 replace them, it is not astonishing that the poverty of our 

 woodlands has reached a point which compels the inhabitants 

 of the State to draw nearly their whole supply of lumber from 

 portions of the country more recently settled. This is 

 attended with so much expense and inconvenience that many 

 valuable industries have already moved from Massachusetts, 

 and it is not improbable that at no distant day many others 

 depending on the forests for their existence will be compelled 

 to do likewise. By the census of 1870, there were in Mas- 

 sachusetts, besides the woodlands, nearly two million (1,988,- 

 164) acres of unimproved laud. Of these, at least 1,200,000 

 are admirably suited for forest growth, and if planted with 

 trees adapted to the various soils and situations, they would 

 produce at the end of fifty years a crop, the actual value 

 of which in dollars can only be reckoned by hundreds of 

 millions. 



It is impossible to estimate the indirect profit of such plan- 

 tations in improved climate and water-power ; but that it 

 would equal or excel the actual value of the timber produced 

 seems not improbable, while the benefits arising from so large 

 an additional area of forest would be felt far beyond the limits 

 of the State. There are in Massachusetts, according to the last 

 returns, 26,500 farms (a falling oif of 7,500 since 1850), which 

 average one hundred and three acres in extent. There is not 

 a farm of this size in the State which could not be rendered 

 more valuable if a strip of land, equal to at least one-tenth 

 of its whole area and on its northern boundary, was devoted 

 to a belt of trees, which would serve to protect the remainder 

 from the cold winds of winter, and render its cultivation more 

 profitable and its occupation more agreeable. Such timber- 

 belts would, in the aggregate, give the State 340,000 additional 

 acres covered with trees. 



It is true that if the existing woodlands were increased to 

 the extent I suggest, their area would cover not twenty-five, 

 but nearly fifty, per cent, of the whole State. But it must be 



