A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 



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objective. It is believed that it may be safely forecast that as further 

 experience continues to improve the management, and as the under- 

 taking expands in area, the contribution will be increasingly greater. 



HOW THE PROPERTY WAS BUILT UP 



The major part of the national-forest area has been made up from 

 the unreserved public domain in most cases what was left after 



Erivate ownership had, over many years, acquired the choicer timber- 

 ind under the public land laws. Thus, for the most part, the public 

 land available since 1891 when the first national forest was created 

 has lain in the mountainous portions of the West. Even here private 

 ownership had acquired considerable areas within what were later 

 established as the exterior boundaries of the national forests, both 

 through selection of the better stands of timber and by the checker- 

 board land grants made by the Federal Government to aid the build- 

 ing of several of the transcontinental railroads. In addition to this 

 form of alienation, there are within the national-forest boundaries 

 private lands obtained under the mining and town site laws, and 

 agricultural homesteads in the narrow valleys running up into the 

 national forests or pocketed in the surrounding timbered areas. 

 Thus, while there are 186,215,256 acres of land within the national- 

 forest boundaries (table 1), 24,854,565 are in other than Federal 



TABLE 1. National-forest areas and established purchase areas not yet proclaimed 

 as national forests, by administrative regions (as of June SO, 1932} 



NATIONAL FORESTS 



PURCHASE AREAS 



1 Includes only those within which lands are being acquired. 



ownership, leaving 161,360,691 acres of federally owned national- 

 forest lands. Figure 1 shows the location of the national forests and 

 of 3 purchase areas in Wisconsin and 1 in Mississippi which are 

 are verging on national-forest status. 



Despite the fact that the Federal Government waited for " second 

 table" for its forest-land meal, the public did get a large area of good 

 grade forest land in the national forests. The public also got much 

 of its land located where experience both in Europe and this country 

 shows it should be at the headwaters of streams. The protection, 



