TIMBER SUPPLY — GREELEY 535 



board feet. Between 1T99 and 1834 pine lumber cut on the Kennebec 

 River in Maine was sold on the Boston market for from $10 to $14 

 per thousand board feet. Slowly, very slowly, the frontier of virgin 

 forest began to move back from tlie centers of population, and, as the 

 sawmill followed its retreat, the element of transportation entered 

 into the cost of forest products. 



Up to the time of the Civil War, short and cheap lumber hauls, 

 almost wholly by water, characterized our timber traffic. Lumber 

 or logs moved down the Atlantic coast from Maine to Boston, about 

 225 miles, from the upper Hudson to New York, not over 200 miles, 

 and from the shores of the Great Lakes into Buffalo and Chicago. 

 The rafting of the Pennsylvania rivers rarely covered more than 

 400 miles; and the bulk of the products of " Penn's AVoods" moved 

 much shorter distances, as from Williamsport to Philadelphia. 

 One or two or three dollars at the most paid the freight bill on a 

 thousand feet, and the consumer's price was correspondingly low. 

 Even up to 1902 the short local shipments from the Lake region 

 held cargo prices on white pine boards at Chicago down to $16 

 per thousand feet or less. 



The change came with the railroad building and industrial ex- 

 pansion that followed the Civil War. Lumber manufacture ceased 

 to be a village industry. It caught the spirit of "big business" and 

 rapidly forged into the lead with large organizations, tremendous 

 capitalization, and the efficient tools of quantity production. It 

 reached out with vmequaled driving power in manufacture and 

 merchandising. It taught the American people to use wood in 

 prodigious and unheard-of quantities. In 1840 the per capita 

 consumption of lumber probably did not exceed 100 board feet. 

 By 1906 it had become 516 board feet. Behind the sawmills came 

 the paper mills, using more and more wood until it noAV forms 90 

 per cent of their raw material. Through their energetic attack upon 

 the forests another great national appetite for v.'ood has been created. 

 The per capita consumption of paper has increased five fold since 

 1840. Then came the A'cneer plants, the distillation plants, the 

 vehicle and agricultural -implement factories, the makers of rail- 

 road ties and telegraph poles, and a hundred industrial develop- 

 ments with their greater or lesser demands for timber. The ex- 

 ploitation of virgin forests has been a foremost contributor to the 

 economic gi'owth of the United States during the last 70 years. 



It was inevitable that our timber resources should shrink rapidly 

 before this terrific onslaught. The story is told in the maps show- 

 ing the approximate extent of the virgin forests in 1620, 1850, and 

 1920. The first 230 years of settlement and industrial expansion 

 made relatively slight inroads. In the last 70 years the depletion 



