552 ANNUAL REPORT OP THE Off. Doc. 



REPOKT OF FOIIESTS AND FORESTRY 



By I. C. WILLIAMS, ESQ., Deputy Commissioner of Forestry 



The work of tlie Department of Forestry may be properly di- 

 vided into three classes: First, conservation; second, protection, and 

 third, the development of forest resources. 



During the year just passed we have added to the area of our forest 

 reserves, 32,714 acres, so that the total area of the forest reserves 

 owned by the Commonwealth, on January 1, of this year, was 966,- 

 295 acres. There are now under contract to the Department a 

 sufficient number of acres to bring the area up to a round million, 

 provided we are able to purchase them. 



This land was all bought and paid for by appropriations made by 

 the Pennsylvania Legislature, beginning about the year 1898, and 

 consequently covering a period of thirteen years; and the average 

 cost of this land to the State on January 1, 1912, was two dollars 

 and twentj^-four cents per acre. As land goes in Pennsylvania, this 

 would seem to be an exceptionally low price, and it is a fact that a 

 large proportion of the acreage purchased is really worth a very 

 great deal more today than two dollars and twenty-four cents; in 

 fact, the value of these reserves to the State today stands about six 

 to seven dollars per acre. To show you, let me cite an instance: 

 An area was bought in 1902, and -was then well covered with a fine 

 stand of timber, which the owner thought he could not take out with 

 a profit; consequently he let the State have it for two dollars and 

 fifty cents an acre. There were many trees in the tract as it was — 

 hundreds of them — which were worth more per tree than the price 

 paid per acre. Eight years l;Mer, in the year 1910, the gentleman 

 who sold this land to the De])ai 'ment, returned and wished to buy it 

 back at a price more than th'-^e times what we paid for it, and he 

 would have been mighty glad ^f he could have repurchased it at triple 

 the price; but there is no authority of law to sell an acre of this 

 land, consequently we could not sell ; and for the further reason that 

 these lands are all too valuable to the State to part with, even if the 

 authority did exist. 



Now, as to the care the Department is taking of these lands: 

 There is the pruning and planting, and it is the result of this need 

 that there are today upon the forest reseryes forty-six State Foresters, 

 who have received a technical and practical education in the school 

 established and maintained for the purpose of educating foresters. 

 With them there is a corps of helpers of about ninety other men who 

 are known as "Forest Rangers," and all give the State a full return 

 in every direction. First in work. These foresters, with their assist- 

 ants, the rangers, last year completed over a thousand miles of roads 

 and trails in the reserves — a road sufficiently long to cross the State 

 three times from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. There is no use talk- 

 ing about the value of reserves until you have the means of getting 



