The Beginnings of Lumbering in the New World 23 



the tickets all sold the aggregate would bring in ^163,200 or 

 $815,000. Against these there were to be put into the wheels 

 these 50 townships of six miles square, equal to 1,107,396 acres 

 of land, and every ticket would entitle the holder to a prize — the 

 lowest half a mile square and the highest a township. A con- 

 siderable part of the tickets .sold, and at the time of drawing 

 William Bingham of Philadelphia took what lands the ticket- 

 holders did not draw, and bought in afterwards the greater part 

 of their prize lots. At one time Bingham's heirs owned 2,350,00c 

 acres of these lands — a territory nearly half as large as the state 

 of Massachusetts. The state had disposed of 3,500,000 acres in 

 twelve years after the close of the war. 



If the wise regulations for guarding against the waste of 

 timber on the common lands so early enacted by the ' ' towns- 

 men" of Dover, Portsmouth and Kittery (Berwick being then 

 part of Kittery) had been generally adopted throughout the 

 colonies and continued and enforced by their successors to the 

 present day, there would have been no danger of a timber 

 famine in this country for a long time to come. The wild lands 

 of Maine and the White Mountain Region of New Hampshire, 

 comprising in extent nearly one half the area of those states, 

 would have been public property today instead of being in the 

 hands of a coterie of lumber kings. But since those early days 

 the vast forests, which then covered and adorned the continent 

 and which had often been renewed by the processes of nature 

 have been largely displaced by the hand of man, and the agency 

 of man in hewing and burning down these forests has so far out- 

 stripped their natural reproduction that the present generation 

 is compelled to consider the best methods of conserving what now 

 remains. 



John E. Hobbs. 



