8 REPORT ON THE TIMBERS OF THE 
region and the Tradewater country will be called upon to fur- 
iish the timbers which are now furnished by the upper Ten- 
nessee. The only practical difficulty in the way is, that 
Clark river, the only stream penetrating the Purchase which 
is available for floating timber to Paducah, is so flat and 
sluggish, and has so little fall, that the floating of any con- 
siderable raft of timber upon it will be a matter of some 
difficulty. The admirable timbers that grow all along the 
smaller streams of the Purchase country can be reached only 
by local saw-mills or by railroad. Lumber establishments at . 
Hickman can float timbers down Mayfield creek and Obion 
river. 
At present, so far as I am aware, the drain upon the tim- 
bers of the Purchase region comes from the establishments at 
Paducah and from local mills. The two Paducah firms men- 
tioned above saw an average of 6,160,000 feet of lumber an- 
nually. Not more than one third of this amount is obtained 
from Kentucky, and, at most, not more than 2,000,000 feet of 
it can come from the Purchase. If we count an average of 
ten good lumber trees to an acre, which would be a low aver- 
age along the streams in this part of Kentucky, and allow 
500 feet of sawed lumber for each tree, which would also be 
a low average, we shall have 5,000 feet of good lumber 
in each acre of ground. At that rate, these two firms, to 
obtain their 2,000,000 feet of lumber, annually strip 400 acres 
of ground of its valuable timbers. That is very little, com- 
pared with the hundreds of thousands of acres of fine tim- 
bers lying along all the streams in this part of Kentucky. It 
is impossible even to estimate the amount of timber used by 
the local saw-mills, which are scattered along all the streams 
wherever a good body of timber is to be found, and which 
change their location as the timber is exhausted. | think it 
safe to say, though, that they saw from 3,000,000 to 5,006,000 
feet of lumber annually. If this be true, at the estimates 
given above, they now clear-up from 500 to 800 acres of tim- 
ber land yearly, and something like an annual timber drain 
of 1,200 acres is made upon the Purchase country. This tim- 
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