100 FOREST commissioner's REPORT. 



methods practiced, little, except the bare ledges, was waste. 

 To the left again, lay a swamp area of considerable extent, 

 but this was not without its timber, while all intermediate 

 land was covered with a heavy mixed growth in which was a 

 strong mixture of spruce. Much of the timber, too, was of 

 the finest to be found. Good drainage and sufficient soil are 

 the almost uniform attendants of these rough lands, and except 

 well up in the mountains the spruce in this region gains its 

 largest size and finest quality. 



The cutting here practiced was of especial interest. Most 

 lumbermen say that in an ordinary chance, with any distance 

 ^e^^^'^e whatever to haul, trees less than ten or twelve 

 cutting. inches at the butt are not worth handlino-. Neither 

 would the average lumberman fjo 1,500 feet in vertical height 

 up a mountain side for the little stunted spruce found on such 

 places. Owning the land himself and charging himself no 

 stumpage whatever, merely the difficulties of lumbering would 

 stop him from so doing. He would say it didn't pay, that that 

 timber under present conditions of business was out of reach 

 for human use. Not so here however. Berlin, consuming 

 in its different mills a hundred millions of spruce per year, 

 provides a market for logs of all sizes and grades. The thick 

 stand, and the evenness of it, requiring that roads be put in 

 thickly and everywhere, induces the closest cutting, while 

 organizing ability of the first order overmatches the hardest 

 natural obstacles, and brings to market at a profit a quality of 

 timber which for ordinary operators to handle would be finan- 

 cially ruinous. Carloads of logs have been hauled into Berlin 

 which ran as high as forty sticks to the thousand. 



But we must see in what shape cutting leaves the land here. 

 If this report, like some publications on the subject of forestry, 

 were a picture book, and the selector of choice landscapes had 

 by any evil chance got as far as ten miles away from commo- 

 dious cars and a soft bed, this volume would no doubt have been 

 adorned with several views from this locality. It is the hardest 

 cutting ever seen by the writer outside of a woodlot. When 

 the operation was first started, cord wood was cut as well as 



