PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS: 
DEFORESTATION AND Its Errects AMONG THE HILL oF 
SouTHERN INDIANA. 
3y GLENN CULBERTSON. 
No region of America, east of the Rocky Mountains, was in the past 
more densely wooded than were the hills and valleys of southern Indiana. 
Some of the most magnificent specimens of the temperate latitude forest 
trees found a suitable habitat along the crests of the divides, and upon 
the valley slopes of the Ohio River and its tributaries. Very few un- 
wooded areas were found among the hills of southern Indiana, and such 
as were present were not large. 
The “flats” or “slash” lands, forming the watersheds between the Ohio 
and the Wabash and their tributaries in many parts of southeastern In- 
diana, were occupied largely by the sweet gum, or liquidamber, the black 
gum, beech, shell-bark hickory, black-jack and red oaks, red maple and 
hackberry. 
On the gently-rolling land and among the hills the yellow poplar, white 
and chinquapin oaks, the black walnut, sugar maple, beech, hickory, buck- 
eye, black locust, linn or basswood, the white and blue ash, and on the 
still more precipitous and rocky ridges the chestnut oak and cedar, were 
found. 
In the rich alluvial bottoms, and along the streams, in addition to 
many of the rolling land trees, were present in their greatest luxuriance 
the elm, the cottonwood and the sycamore. Many of these trees were 
among the giants in dimensions. There were yellow poplars from one hun- 
dred to one hundred and twenty-five feet in height, and from twenty 
to twenty-five or more feet in circumference. Sycamores grew along the 
larger streams and in the river bottoms, of such dimensions that their 
hollow trunks were sometimes used as rude dwellings and as stables. 
White oaks and black walnuts grew to such size and in such profusion 
that were they to be had now, in their original numbers, their value would 
be twenty-fold greater than the present value of the land from which they 
were cut. 
