I!KD SPRUCE LANDSCAPE. MT. COLL INS. SEVIER COUNTY, TENNESSEE 



regioiiB. The logs go to sawmills iii small numbers iu the uorthein 

 tier of states, and the lumber is of good quality. Trees are from 

 forty-five to one hundred and twenty feet in height, and from 

 one to three feet in diameter. The wood is light, soft, compact, and 

 satiny. The sap-wood and heart are hardly distinguishable. The 

 lumber goes to market as black spruce in Canada and northern 

 United States: In Alaska it is sold under its own name. Except 

 in southern Alaska, it is the principal native softwood in that 

 territory. In the United States more white spruce is manufac- 

 tured into pulp than into lumber. 



Sitka spruce (Picea .sitchensis) ranges from southern Alaska to 

 Mendocino county, California. It is often called tideland spruce 

 from its habit of keeping close to the sea. That is true in the 

 northern part of its range, but in the South it is found farther 

 ,back. It grows in a belt about fifty miles wide and 1,500 miles 

 :long, a slender ribbon along the Pacific coast where the fogs and 

 ocean winds create the moist, warm environment suited to its 

 development. Sitka spruce is the largest spruce in America. Trees 

 are usually one hundred feet high and three or four feet in diam- 

 eter; but some are fifteen feet in diameter, and two hundred feet 

 high. Its base is swelled by large buttresses, and stumps are often 

 cut high to avoid the enlarged butts. Two or three thousand feet 

 of good lumber may be left in the stump of a single tree. 



Sitka spruce lumber is appearing in all the principal eastern 

 markets, and is largely exported to many foreign ports. It is 

 usually known in the market as western spruce. That distinguishes 

 it from the eastern and northeastern species, but not from the 

 Engelmann spruce which is beginning to appear in the markets 

 as a competitor. 



Black Spruce (Picca mariana) approaches, but does not reach the 

 northern limits of white spruce. It extends from Labrador to 

 Alaska. It passes beyond the southern border of white spruce and 

 forms valuable forests in Michigan, Wisconsin, aid Minnesota, as 

 well as in the New England states and in the northern portion of the 

 Appalachain mountain ranges. In the- eastern mountains it is not 



so valuable, being smaller. It is there largely confined to cold, 

 sphagnum swamps. It is not easy to name an average size for this 

 tree, because it varies greatly in different localities. Sometimes the 

 mature black spruce is only twenty or thirty feet high and from, 

 six to twelve inches in diameter. In other localities it attains a 

 diameter of three feet and a height of one hundred feet or more. 



Red spruce {Picea niicTis) is the important source of spruce lum- 

 ber in West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and North Carolina. It 

 is also found farther north. It is usually a tree from seventy to 

 eighty feet high and from one and a half to three in diameter. 

 It grows as' far north as Prince Edward's Island. In culti- 

 vation it grows more slowly than any other spruce. Black and red 

 spruce intermingle in parts of these ranges, and they are so nearly 

 alike that botanists have not always been in accord as to the exact 

 separation of the species. It was formerly held by some that black 

 spruce was the prevailing species in the spruce lumber output 

 south, of New York; but the latest view now seems to be that red 

 spruce furnishes practically all of the lumber of that region. 



The character of spruce wood is much the same, no matter what 

 species it is. There is much more difference in weight, Strength, 

 hardness, and color between different trees of the same species, 

 when grown under extreme conditions, than between the woods of 

 different species under normal conditions. The average spruce lumber 

 is therefore, dependable. Whether it comes from the Sitka species 

 that grows in the fogs of Puget Sound, the white spruce on the 

 shore of Lake Superior, the black spruce of northern Maine, or the 

 red species on high mountains in North Carolina, the lumber will 

 sustain the high character of the spruce family. 



Pines vary in the weight of wood more than two to one for 

 different species; spruces only about thirty-three per cent. The 

 following weights of spruce per cubic foot are for oven-dry speci- 

 mens: Eed spruce, 28.57; black, 28; Sitka, 26.72; white, 25.25; blue. 

 23.31; Engelmann, 21.49. 



Spruce is usually rated as the strongest for its weight of the com 

 mercial woods of this country. In actual strength it surpasses some 



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