THE INFLUENCE OF FORESTRY UPON THE LUMBER 



INDUSTRY. 



By OVERTON W. PRICE, 



Assistant Forester, Bureau of Forestry. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE LUMBER INDUSTRY. 



The development of the lumber industry in this country is without 

 parallel. It now ranks fourth among the great manufacturing indus- 

 tries of the United States, and represents an invested capital of about 

 $611,000,000 and an annual outlay of over $100,000,000 in wages. It 

 affords through its three great branches the logging industiy, the 

 sawmill industry, and the planing-mill industry a means of livelihood 

 to considerably over a million persons. The annual value of the prod- 

 ucts, which has multiplied nearly ten times in the last half centuiy, 

 is $566,000,000. But although the rapid development of the lumber 

 industry has had far-reaching results in furthering every branch of 

 manufacture which depends upon wood, it has been fundamentally 

 unsound in principle. The settler who cuts and sells trees without 

 forethought from land fit only for forest growth has not enriched 

 himself in the long run. The havoc which has been wrought in the 

 forests of the United States has turned trees into money, but has put 

 the balance on the wrong side of the sheet by rendering vast areas 

 unproductive. It is the history of all great industries directed by 

 private interests that the necessity for modification is not seen until 

 the harm has been done and its results are felt. This fact has 

 been emphasized in the lumber industry in the earlier days by the 

 instinctive feeling of the colonist against his natural enem}-, the forest, 

 v and later by the remarkable inducements offered by lumbering for 

 present profit only. . The first settlers had two objects in view in their 

 attack upon the forest the one to clear land for their farms, the 

 other to procure wood for their buildings, fuel, and fences. As the 

 tide of colonization rose, and as the uses for wood in manufacture 

 increased in number and extent, lumbering rapidly assumed the 

 proportions of a business enterprise, and from supplying only per- 

 sonal wants it became profitable to supply also those of others. 

 With an apparently inexhaustible supply of timber available, and with 

 an insistent and growing demand, the lumber industry came to offer 

 remarkable opportunities for money making. Step by step with its 

 development improvement in tools and machinery took place. The 

 changes that enterprise and ingenuity have wrought in the American 

 sawmill are no less wonderful than those which have taken place in the 



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