756 A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 



The second annual report of the Commission quoted from one of its 

 inspectors : 



The State in past years has expended large sums of money with the view of cor- 

 rectly locating its lands according to the original surveys and of furnishing a cor- 

 rect map, drawn to such a scale that individual plots are plainly shown. That 

 this has never been accomplished those best know w r ho have had occasion to 

 investigate the matter. * * * Many examinations of State lots have been 

 made during the past season, but in every case it required an expert to locate the 

 corners or lines. 



Experts were either old residents who themselves had worked out 

 the lines or persons familiar with the local condition, "handed down 

 with other matters of local importance", regarding property bound- 

 aries. Most of the surveys establishing the lines and corners had 

 been made in the latter part of the eighteenth and the early part pf the 

 nineteenth century. Trees were marked for corners, with the true 

 corner marked by a stake ("the perished monument of an hundred 

 years ago"), supplemented by a corner marking on some tree near at 

 hand. In marking the lines between the corners, trees were blazed 

 both on the true line and on trees each side of the line. Through the 

 death and fall of many of the marked trees, the accurate reestablish- 

 ment of the original line, in many places almost entirely and some- 

 times purposely obliterated, became a very difficult task. 



THE NEW YORK PROBLEM OF OBJECTIVES 



The major problems with which the commission had to grapple 

 during its first several years, other than those relating to building 

 up a suitable form of organization, were problems having to do with 

 land acquisition and land retention, and the protection of the State 

 land and timber against spoliation and fire. That the State lands 

 badly needed blocking up has already been shown. At the time that 

 the policy of State retention of tax forfeited lands was inaugurated, 

 it was assumed that further tax forfeitures would continue to operate 

 as a means of extending and consolidating the State properties. In 

 point of fact, the adoption of the State policy came just at the time 

 when the tide turned. The Adirondack region was about to enter a 

 period of rising land and timber values. As a recreation region, it 

 was to change from an undeveloped wilderness paradise for hardy 

 sportsmen into a resort country of hotels, cottages, private estates of 

 wealthy men, extensive private club hunting grounds, and all that 

 goes with popularity as a summer playground and fashionable water- 

 ing place. Instead of getting more land through tax reversions, the 

 commissioners found themselves losing a good deal of the land already 

 obtained. Laws passed in the days when the main anxiety of the 

 State was to get rid of its land made it possible for many claimants 

 to attack the State's title, on the flimsiest kind of evidence. 



There can be little doubt 



Said the commission in its report for 1888 



that many applications for both cancellations and redemptions of the State's title 

 have been based upon fraudulent affidavits and misrepresentation of facts, and 

 that many such fraudulent applications have been successful. 



Defense of the State's property against the pillage of its timber 

 raised other difficult legal problems. Until the commission had its 

 hands less full in trying to hold the property of the State against 



