128 The Forest Pkoducts Laboratory 



fourteen billion feet of timber of merchantable sizes. Three-fifths of 

 the timber originally in the United States is gone. 



All told we are taking about four times the amount of wood out 

 of our forests every year which we are growing in them. We are cut- 

 ting more of everj^ class of timber than we are growing. We are even 

 using up the trees too small for the sawmill, but upon which our future 

 lumber supply depends, three and one-half times as fast as they are' 

 being produced. 



Of still greater significance is the fact that the timber left is not 

 in the right place. The crux of timber depletion is the exhaustion, or 

 partial exhaustion, of the forests most available to the great bulk of 

 our population, agriculture, and manufactures. One timber region 

 after another in the eastern states has been cut out. Less than five 

 per cent of the virgin forests of New England and about twelve per 

 cent of her original stand of timber are left. Xew York, the leading 

 state in lumber production in 1850, now manufactures only thirty 

 board feet per capita yearly, or not more than a tenth of the require- 

 ments of her own population and industries. Pennsylvania was the 

 leading lumber manufacturing state in 1860. She now cuts less than 

 the amount consumed in the Pittsburg district alone. 



The original pine forests of the Lake States, estimated at 350 

 billion feet, are now reduced to less than eight billion. In 1892 the 

 sawmills in the region bordering the Great Lakes cut nine billion board 

 feet of lumber and largely supplied the softwood markets of the Prai- 

 rie and Central States and eastward to New England. Today their 

 yearly cut is a single billion. These four densely populated regions, 

 stretching from the Atlantic to the Prairies, which formerly were lum- 

 ])er exporters and still contain enormous areas of forest land, are now 

 partly or largely dependent upon timber grown and manufactured 

 elsewhere and are becoming increasingly dependent upon timber which 

 must be shipped the width of the continent. 



The bulk of the building and structural timbers used in the east- 

 ern and central states during the last twenty years was grown in the 

 pine forests of the south. But the cut of southern pine is now falling- 

 off and within another decade promises to exceed by little, if at all, the 

 requirements of the southern states themselves. The shifting of the 

 hardwood industries has followed much the same course. The princi- 

 pal reserve of hardwoods is in the Southern Mississippi Valley and 



