512 



AMERICAN* FORESTRY 



about by silence or a non-committal attitude. Our ex- 

 pression must be definite and emphatic. 



The United States Forest Service is authority for the 

 statement that forest fires annually destroy two billion 

 feet of timber, or material enough to build a five-room 

 frame house every one hundred feet on both sides of a 

 road extending from New York to Chicago. With four 

 people to a house, these 100,000 or more buildings 

 would provide a home for nearly one-fourth our yearly 

 increase in population a number sufficient to populate 

 a new city each year the size of Cincinnati, New Orleans, 

 Minneapolis, Kansas City, Missouri, or Seattle. More 

 than 160,000 forest fires have occurred in the United 

 States during the past five years, 80 per cent of which 

 were due to human agencies and therefore preventable. 

 These conflagrations burned over 56,488,000 acres an 

 area greater than that included within the States of 

 Ohio and Pennsylvania and destroyed $85,700,000 



worth of timber and property. If this needless waste 

 were stopped and the material thus saved put into 

 houses, the various business interests concerned in build- 

 ing construction, such as lumber dealers, carpenters, 

 masons, and supply houses, would, it is estimated, benefit 

 to the extent of more that $400,000,000 annually. Rank- 

 ers and real estate dealers would also ])rofit through the 

 sale of lands and by loans on homes to the extent 

 of an additional $300,000,000. Forest fires are therefore 

 of vital concern to not only the everyday citizens, but to 

 every business man and laborer. 



Forest protection goes hand in hand with national 

 prosperity. Next to food and clothing, wood is the most 

 indispensable ])roduct of nature. Without wood there 

 can be no agriculture, no manufacture, no commerce. 

 Forest fires destroy life and j)roperty, impoverish the 

 soil, drive away animal life, cause floods and drought, 

 and make waste the playgrounds of the people. 



EXPERIMENT STATION OPENED AT ASHEVILLE 



A new forest experiment station, the first in the East- 

 ern States, has just been established at Asheville, N. C, 

 by the Forest Service of the United States Department 

 of Agriculture. Steady depletion of the Southern Ap- 

 palachian timber supply has been responsible for the 

 location of this station in the East, and the object of the 

 work to be conducted will be to secure the information 

 needed by foresters to determine the best methods of 

 handling forest lands in the southern mountains. 



For many years the United States has depended for 

 a large part of its hardwood timber products on North 

 Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennes- 

 see, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, states the 

 Forest Service. The crest of hardwood production in 

 this region, with a cut of approximately 4 billion feet, 

 was reached in 1909. In 1918 the production had fallen 

 off nearly 60 per cent in the face of rising lumber prices 

 and increasing demands. There is every reason to ex- 

 pect the same trend to continue, owing to the steady 

 decrease in timber supplies. This involves one of our 

 most important hardwood forest regions and many im- 

 portant dependent wood-using industries, including rail- 

 roads. 



The country as a whole will, in the future, have to 

 depend on the steep mountain slopes of the Southern 

 Appalachians for a very large percentage of its high 

 grade hardwood supplies. The bulk of the remaining 

 hardwood stands is now in the Lower Mississippi Val- 

 ley, and it is practically certain that a large part of this 

 rich bottom land will be used fur agricultural purposes, 

 when the timber is removed. The entire country should, 

 therefore, be directly interested in bringing about the 

 growing of hardwood timber in this region, where ideal 

 conditions exist for its production. 



The general timber situation in the United States is 

 exceedingly serious, foresters say. Something like three- 

 fifths of our original timber stand has been destroyed 

 or utilized, and an appreciable percentage of the remain- 



ing two-fifths is made up of inferior second-growth. One- 

 half of the timber we have left is in the three Pacific 

 Coast States Washington, Oregon, and California 

 while 90 per cent of our timber markets lie east of the 

 Rockies, and a very large part of that 90 per cent east 

 of the Mississippi River. Excessive prices for lumber, 

 pulp paper, and practically all wood products have re- 

 sulted from this situation. 



The Appalachian forest experiment station will have 

 to deal with the problems of a forest area approximately 

 equal to twice that of prewar Germany. It will have to 

 cover the problems of a large number of valuable species 

 of trees, including 10 or more oaks, several hickories, 

 which have, so far as is known, no foreig.i equivalents, 

 yellow poplar, basswood, black walnut, cherry, specialty 

 woods of high value, several valuable ashes, chestnut, 

 and a number of other hardwoods. White pine and 

 spruce and some southern pines are also well represented 

 in this region. 



Special problems under consideration are: The con- 

 version of extensive cut-over, fire-damaged, and rel- 

 atively unproductive forests into rapidly growing' for- 

 ests of the best species ; methods for replacing the 

 blighted chestnut forests ; fire protection ; the relation of 

 grazing to forest growth and reproduction ; methods of 

 management which will produce the greatest protection 

 to municipal watersheds ; the greatest regulation of 

 stream flow ; the i^revention of erosion. Studies in the 

 quantity of timber of different species that can be suc- 

 cessfully grown, and the development of methods for 

 artificial reforestation will be part of die work. The 

 whole technical basis for the practice of forestry for the 

 region will be covered, in addition to the problems of 

 National Forest administration. Success in reforestation, 

 timber growing, and protection will depend largely upon 

 the technical knowledge obtainable by means of the 

 newly established forest experiment station. 



