Deck.mbkk J, 1913.J 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



113 



Fifty Square Miles of Rubber Trees. 



THE GENERAL RUBBER COMPANY'S VAST SUMATRA PLANTATION. 



IN the first photograph shown below it will be noticed that 

 there is quite a rise of ground— one might almost call it a 

 hill — in the foreground. If one were standing at the top 

 of that little elevation he could see a sight impossible to dupli- 

 cate anywhere else in the world. He could look down through 

 continuous avenues of Hcvea BrasUiensis trees for seven miles. 

 If he were to visit that same spot four or five years from now 

 he would undoubtedly be able to look through avenues of rub- 

 ber trees twenty miles long. But that is a later story. 



This view is in the center of the great rubber plantation of 

 the Holland-American Plantation Co. of Amsterdam, a sub- 

 sidiary of the General Rubber Co., of New York, which, as is 

 known to the trade, is the company that supplies all the crude 

 rubber to the United States Rubber Co. and in a general way 

 is under the control of that great organization. This planta- 

 tion, which comprises 85,000 acres, already has 34,000 acres of rub- 

 ber trees, or over 53 square miles. The vast scope of this enter- 

 prise and the great dimensions it has already assumed have 

 made this plantation the cynosure of the trade and focused upon 

 it the attention of the rubber growing world. There is nothing 

 else in existence comparable to it in size. The Malacca planta- 

 tion, which is the next in acreage, has 15,000 acres planted to 



View T.m<en from Hill, from Which 12,000 Planted Acres 

 Can Be Seen. 



rubber and has hitherto been looked upon as a probable record 

 maker for many years. But that is already a distant second. 

 Perhaps a clearer conception of the size of this plantation may 

 be obtained by stating that the planted acreage is already two 

 and a half times the size of Manhattan Island. To a New- 

 Yorker, at least, that is very convincing, as the true Manhat- 

 tanite believes that there are very few things in the world 

 larger than his island. Or to put it in another form, if the 

 4,000,000 trees now on the estate were planted in a row, 19 feet 

 apart — the shortest distance between any two trees in the planta 

 tion — they would reach 14,000 miles, or farther than from Ne\-. 

 York to Sumatra. And all this great enterprise is the result of 

 less than four years' work. 



It will be remembered that in the spring of 1910 the price of 

 crude rubber soared to the three dollar mark, but for eighteen 

 months before that time it had been climbing with a rapidity 

 most inauspicious for the manufacturer. It was most natural, 

 therefore, that the directors of the United States Rubber Co. 

 should ask themselves why it was necessary for a great manu- 



facturing organization using from one-fourth to one-third of all 

 the crude rubber coming into the United States to be at the mercy 

 ijf the capricious seriiigueiro and the almost equally irresponsible 



INDIA RUBBER WORLD 

 DEC. 1913 



Map of Sumatra. 



.S'iu;n'-' \\'lli Pointing Arrow Showing Location of the Holland- .American 



Plantation. 



aviador. It was natural that they should ask themselves why, 

 with their great manufacturing and distributing system, they 

 should not e.Ktend their organization until they controlled rub- 

 ber from the ground up, or, to grow alliterative, from the soil 

 to the sale. 



They concluded it was worth investigating, and they sent Mr. 

 Edgar B. Davis — who in his private travels had visited the 

 Middle East extensively and was already quite familiar with 

 that part of the world — over to the Malay Peninsula and the 

 adjacent territory to reconnoitre. Obviously this was an enter- 

 prise that required not only American gumption but the best 

 Icical experts, thoroughly at home in plantation matters. Con- 



JuNGLE Before Clearing. 

 sequently there were associated with Mr. Davis two of the 

 most eminent authorities on plantation matters in the Middle 

 East, Mr. W. J. Gallagher, Director of Agriculture in the Fed- 

 erated Malay States, who had devoted several years to the 



