WHITE PINE. 37 



conservative in view of the fact that a considerable part of the origi- 

 nal pine forest produced 10,000 feet per acre and the actual amount 

 of this pine marketed from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois has 

 exceeded 200 billion board feet, 



EARLY DEVELOPMENT. 



"When the earliest colonists landed in New England they found 

 the coast in most places densely wooded with white pine, and the 

 valleys were filled with it. There are records, apparently well 

 authenticated, of trees 240 feet 'high, and the extreme limit of 270 

 feet was claimed for one that stood on the site of Dartmouth Col- 

 lege. The cutting of this timber began at once. Within 15 years 

 after the settlement at Plymouth a cargo of masts was shipped to 

 England, and from that time on the trade between New England 

 and the mother country was maintained. Within 30 years after the 

 landing of the Pilgrim Fathers the people of New England were 

 sending white pine to Madagascar and Guinea in Africa, where it 

 was exchanged for slaves for the Virginia and the West Indies trade. 

 Exchanges of the timber were also made for other than human 

 chattels. The Canary Islands, which produced wine, bought pine 

 staves from Massachusetts and paid in wine, while Cuba, Haiti, and 

 other sugar islands exchanged sugar for barrel and hogshead staves. 

 A foreign trade, very large for that time, was carried on with white- 

 pine timbers cut on the Piscataqua River, and in 1650 fears were 

 expressed that the drain would exhaust the supply. This was within 

 30 years after the first permanent settlement on the New England 

 coast, and at that time, as is now known, the primeval forests had 

 scarcely been touched. The people had an erroneous idea of their 

 extent, and many years after the first alarm was sounded there came 

 another, which drew from Joshua McGee the reply that the cutting 

 of a few hundred masts a year would make little inroad upon 

 America's forests, which were, he said, " 14 or 15 miles long and 300 

 to 400 miles broad." 1 



As late as 1706 there were only 70 sawmills on the Piscataqua 

 River, which was the center of the white-pine operations. Yet the}^ 

 were numerous enough to have made serious inroads upon the forests 

 had they been larger. They were of the sash-saw style, were oper- 

 ated by water power, and their capacity ranged from 1,000 to 3,000 

 feet each per day. All of them combined did not cut as much as 

 one large modern mill. Sawing lumber by hand, as was the only 



1 Industrial Experiments in British Colonies in North America, E. L. Lord, p. 77. The 

 word " long " was here used to denote longitude in its geographical sense, and " broad " 

 meant latitude. The meaning was that the pine forests extended 300 or 400 miles north 

 and south along the coast and 14 or 15 miles east and west, or inward from the coast. 

 The manner of expressing the forest's extent shows how little was then known of its real 

 dimensions. 



