TIMBER SUPPLY GREELEY 



537 



largely by water. When the center of liimLer manufacture moved 

 to the Lake States in the eighties and nineties the era of the box 

 car as a lumber carrier began. Freight rates were long tempered 

 by water transportation on the Lakes, through the Erie Canal, and 

 down the Mississippi ; but at that it cost $6 or $7 per thousand feet 

 to ship lumber a thousand miles from Saginaw to New York by 

 water, or treble the old rate on Hudson River pine. As steadily as 

 the more accessible virgin forests went through the hopper, the 

 railroads gained ascendency in lumber traffic, the hauls lengthened, 

 and the average retail prices rose from one level to another. 



During and following the nineties the pineries of the Lake States 

 rapidly approached exhaustion and the center of the national sup- 

 ply of softwood lumber shifted to the South. Eail shipments in 



AREA OF VIRGIN FOREST 



excess of 750 miles and freight bills of $8 or $10 or more per thou- 

 sand board feet became common. As southern pine gradually se- 

 cured control of the Chicago market, lumber prices advanced to 75 

 or 100 per cent beyond the old rates fixed by water transportation 

 from Michigan or Wisconsin mills. Southern lumber moved 1,100 

 miles to Pittsburgh and 1,500 miles to Boston, at freight rates 

 which, since the World War, have ranged from $12.50 to $15 per 

 thousand feet. Retail prices necessarily climbed to a higher level, 

 but only as a stepping stone to what has followed as the last chap- 

 ter in the exploitation of our virgin forests is being written. 



The virgin pineries of the South covered 130,000,000 acres and 

 contained probably 650,000,000,000 feet of saw timber. They formed 

 one of the richest reservoirs of softwoods on the earth's surface, and 



