A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 337 



damage of $30,000,000 in Vermont alone. The board of engineers 

 studying the Vermont flood situation reported that it would cost 

 at least $40,000,000 to prevent, by means of storage reservoirs, a 

 repetition of the 1927 disaster. 



FORESTS AND THE WATERSHEDS 



Considering the importance to the northeastern States of their 

 municipal water supplies, their water power, and their navigation, 

 and the damages which they suffer periodically from floods and at 

 all times from erosion, the condition of their watersheds with respect 

 to control of run-off is obviously a matter of the greatest concern. 

 The vegetative cover on these watersheds is the one factor in this 

 condition which it appears to be within human power to control. 



LOCATION OF THE FORESTS WITH RESPECT TO CRITICAL AREAS 



Practically the entire region was once densely wooded. Some kind 

 of forest still covers 54 percent of it. The forests are in general 

 located on the steeper slopes at the headwaters of the streams, where 

 there is every reason to believe that a cover of protective vegetation 

 is most badly needed. Forests are, however, nearly absent from 

 a few streams which flow for almost their entire length through 

 agricultural land and which are important as sources of municipal 

 supply. On one of the most critical watersheds of the entire region, 

 from the standpoint of floods, the percentage of forest is rather 

 low: this is the Passaic River watershed, with little over 50 percent 

 in forest. 



ORIGINAL AND PRESENT CHARACTER OF FORESTS AS AFFECTING EROSION 



AND STREAMFLOW 



The original forests of the northeast, now practically gone, were 

 composed of spruce and fir in the north and at the higher elevations 

 further south; northern hardwoods, white pine, and hemlock at 

 intermediate elevations; and mixed hardwoods, largely oak, or 

 hardwoods and hard pines, at the lower elevations. The early 

 cuttings, except when followed by fire, probably did little real 

 damage to the forest. 



Even at the height of the lumber industry large continuous areas of 

 forest were not often cut clean, and removal of the logs from the woods 

 with animals generally in winter, injured the remaining trees and 

 young growth very much less than have the logging methods of many 

 other forest regions. Unfortunately, fires have followed cutting on a 

 great many areas, so that there are in the region as a whole about 

 10 million acres of forest land not now satisfactorily stocked to value- 

 able tree species. These areas include grey birch, scrub oak, aspen- 

 pin cherry, and similar forest types nearly worthless commercially. 

 Probably the most conspicuous and important change wrought by 

 cutting fires in the original forests has been a reduction in the propor- 

 tion of softwoods. A second important result has been the conversion 

 of great areas of originally all-aged forests to an even-aged condition. 



Cutting in the spruce woods for pulp and lumber has unquestion- 

 ably resulted in an inferior growth, but not often in the total destruc- 

 tion of the cover. Over considerable areas the spruce and balsam 



