boards but the pleasing effect of rift sawing is more in favor and besides being 

 desired by the fixture makers on account of minimum shrinkage and warp. 

 Birch is ahead of any other domestic wood for imitating mahogany. The 

 heartwood of the tree is used for this work. The sapwood has a much lighter 

 color but like the heartwood is specially adapted to take stain and receive 

 and hold a soft brilliant polish. Besides mahogany, birch can readily be 

 stained to imitate cherry, Circassian walnut, fumed oak, bog oak, black 

 walnut, and other pleasing effects. The figure of curly birch is especially at- 

 tractive and it brings high prices, going into the highest grades of fixtures. 

 Other finishing woods are mahogany, sugar maple, including large quantities 

 of bird's eye maple, cherry, red gum, black walnut, butternut, and Cirdas- 

 sian walnut. The last named is the most expensive wood and goes only into the 

 most expensive work. Red gum and butternut are frequently found richly 

 mottled and in some respects resembling Circassian walnut. For that reason 

 they are most frequently used of any domestic wood to be finished in imita- 

 tion of this foreign wood. 



This industry calls on the State for only a limited portion of its raw ma- 

 terial. Only a little more than one-third of the total was reported as home cut 

 and of the entire amount of eleven of the woods shipped in from other states, 

 two-thirds were oak and yellow poplar which being demanded in high grades 

 made it necessary to obtain a large portion in regions where the virgin stands 

 of these species are the most abundant. States in the southern Appalachians 

 furnished most of this material. Of the woods listed in the fixture table that 

 are abundantly cut in Pennsylvania the chestnut, birch, sugar maple, bass- 

 wood, cherry, beech, ash, black walnut, and butternut, most of the supply 

 used was State-grown. The fixture manufacturers, therefore, like the other 

 class of manufacturers using home-grown material should be vitally inter- 

 ested in conservation and the movement looking to the State's future timber 

 supply. 



Table 56. Wood for Fixtures, year ending June, 1912. 



