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hardwoods nor of the softwood timber that will produce wide, clear lumbet- 

 or large dimension timbers. 



The Position of tlie State Forests. For the reforestation of the inferior 

 grades of softwoods private enterprise may be adequate. But for the 

 perpetuation of the superior grades of softwoods and of the desirable hard- 

 wood species, such as are native to the soil of the Ohio valley, no adequate 

 provision will have been made until state forests or federal forests shall 

 have been established for that purpose. The hardwoods are of peculiar 

 concern to the states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. But there can be but 

 little prospect of permanent success in their forest enterprises until these 

 states shall have committed themselves definitely to the establishment and 

 maintenance of state forests, and these not as an experiment, but as a 

 business. 



The quantity, location and species of timber with which the appropriate 

 lands of these states should be reforested can wisely be detemined only in 

 relation to the policy which may be established for the nation as a whole. 

 State pride might encourage us to seek for our own industries and our 

 own people, comparative independence of the sources of timber supply out- 

 side the state. But it is not impossible that the interests of these three 

 states may be permanently best served if the bulk of their future supply, 

 for example, of oak lumber should come from West Virginia or Kentucky or 

 Tennessee. There is essentially no greater reason that Indiana should 

 supply her own people with oak from her own forests than that Nebraskan 

 homes should be built of "Nebraskan pine", provided that the land, the 

 labor, and the capital which Indiana would have devoted to the growing of 

 oak timber could have been directed more profitably into other lines of 

 enterprise. 



The test of true conservation is not therefore in the size of the forests, 

 or in the quality of the timber standing therein, but in the fitness of the 

 plan of forestation to contribute to the most efficient possible utilization of 

 the state's resources of land and capital and to the most profitable appli- 

 cation of the labor of its people. "Conservation" of any other kind is not 

 conservation, but waste. 



The specific forest needs of the three states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, 

 cannot, it is true, be determined by the total forest needs of the entire 

 nation, but they can be largely guided by them. Although timber generally 

 is still plentiful there is a growing scarcity of a few important species 

 which may properly cause concern to our industries and people. The fer- 

 tile lands of the Miami and Wabash valleys once carried the finest walnut 

 and oak forests in the middle west. Today the same lands produce the 

 finest corn crops in the Ohio river valley. Fifty years ago pioneer farmers 

 in southern Ohio were having neighborhood "log-rollings" at which they 

 burned millions of feet of black walnut trees like those for which the War 

 Department during the war literally scoured the country to find material 

 for gun stocks. The heavy hewn beams of the old barns in the Ohio 

 valley are of wood that now makes table tops for kings and many an old 

 granary door would make fine furniture. 



The industrial life of these states is today in their farms and pastures, 

 their packing houses, canneries, steel works, refineries and factories. Their 





