58 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



BEFORE AND AFTER. 



Last summer I went back to visit my boyhood home in Ohio, after 

 an absence of thirty years. One of the most striking changes in the 

 landscape was in the roofs of the buildings. They were nearly all of 

 slate instead of shingles. A -shingle roof was a sign that the house was 

 a very old one. Even the chicken houses and barns and woodsheds were 

 roofed with slate. 



For why, wooden shingles had grown so high priced that slates could 

 be brought from a distant state to compete with them ; and the shingles 

 were all made of such knotty, brash, inferior lumber that they rotted 

 away in a short time and were not worth putting on. 



Looking further, it was plain that in thirty years the state had 

 changed from a country of wood to a country of clay. Bricks were the 

 universal building material. Tiles were used where bricks were impos- 

 sible or undesirable. Ceramics was the most important industry of the 

 state. The lumber is gone ! The wood is no more ! The trees are 

 gathered to their fathers ! 



I gazed in astonishment at a vast old oaken barn than had been in 

 the scenes of my childhood ; and talked with the gray-headed patriarch 

 who owned it. Its sills were beams of solid oak, 24 and 26 inches square, 

 30 and 40 feet long, and there were scores of them. Away up, high 

 above the tall haymows, were plates and beams by hundreds, all of 

 sound old oak and each big enough for the foundation of a great 

 building. The whole state now would be raked in vain to find the timber 

 for that one barn. The lumber in it would be worth a huge sum now. 

 But the old man told me it had all been cut from the choice trees of 

 one field, right there and I looked afar over a bare and treeless plain. 



And all Ohio was one great, shaggy forest, only a hundred years ago 

 dense forests of splendid hardwoods, walnut, hickory, oak, ash, maple, 

 beech, sycamore, poplar. It was inexhaustible. The strong and hardy 

 pioneers worked like slaves early and late to cut, burn, clear the land. 

 They were sure the forests would last till the crack of doom. 



Only a hundred years have passed; yet the country is bare; and 

 every springtime now we read of the devastating floods of the Ohio; 

 and the soil of the fertile farms continually goes to feed the yellow tides. 



[E. H.] 



