3D 
ot hill lands of southern Indiana there can be no reasonable doubt that 
as the trees have been removed there have been greater and greater floods; 
and now as the forests have almost entirely disappeared the floods have 
become exceedingly destructive. Dwelling houses that had stood above 
the highest waters of the streams for half a century have, within the 
last decade, since the higher prices for timber have caused the more 
vapid disappearance of the trees, been inundated repeatedly and many 
of them carried away. Bottom lands that twenty years ago had a deep 
and fertile soil are now almost worthless. The flood waters have carried 
away the greater part of the tillable earth and left in its place stones and 
gravel. In other places the alluvium of the bottoms has been covered 
by material from the hills. Thousands of acres of such land, which a 
few years ago was the most fertile and valuable in the State, are now 
undesirable. 
Hand in hand with the flooded conditions and consequent destruction 
caused by the larger streams has gone the loss of soil by erosion from the 
deforested hill lands. It is no exaggeration to say that, from the greater 
number of hill farms placed under cultivation a quarter of a century ago, 
there bas been removed on the average a foot of soil, and from many 
slopes there has been taken three or four times as much. Tens of thou- 
sands of acres of the steeper hillsides have been denuded of their soil 
covering and are at present valueless for ordinary agricultural purposes. 
How to prevent this denudation is the most serious problem that the hill 
farmer has to solve. In many cases a single heavy rain in February or 
March, when the departing frost has left the ground in its least compact 
coudition, has been known to remove from a whole slope an average of 
four or five inches of the soil. Fields that before the rain were consid- 
ered good farming land were left so covered with rocks, and with so little 
soil, that they were practically abandoned. Farmers among the hill lands 
are realizing more and more that a loss of soil is the most serious of prop- 
erty losses, since a damage of this character cannot be repaired except by 
the ordinary processes of nature, which require scores and even hundreds 
of years. Farm after farm in southern Indiana, considered very valuable 
thirty years ago, is practically deserted today. The population of this 
region first occupied the hills, and considered the soils of the flats and 
divides very undesirable. For many years now, however, the tide of move- 
ment of the people has been from the hills to the flat or gently rolling 
