HENRY FORD^S FOREST 



By Ovid M. Butler 



Forester, American Forestry Association 



TN THE upper peninsula of Michigan, where there are 

 --still some long stretches of wooded landscape, Henry 

 Ford has acquired a forest of several hundred thousand 

 acres. It is a good game country, as game in that part 

 of the state goes, but Mr. Ford did not buy those tim- 

 bered acres as a hunting ground. Far from it. He had 

 another purpose and that purpose forms one of the most 

 interesting, stones in American forestry today. 



Already, Henry Ford's 



forest has become an active 

 unit in the Ford operations. 

 At Iron Mountain, Michi- 

 gan, Mr. Ford has built one 

 of the most modern saw- 

 mills in the world. Forest 

 and mill are one hundred 

 miles apart, more or less. Up 

 in the woods, Ford tractors 

 are building logging roads 

 in the timber and when the 

 snow flies, they will be busy 

 from daylight to dawn haul- 

 ing logs over iced roads to a 

 railroad which will transport 

 them to the Iron Mountain 



automatic conveyors out of 

 the mill directly to the lum- 

 ber piles in the yard and 

 then to the dry kilns for 

 final seasoning. 



At the rear of these dry 

 kilns, great doors open into 

 a body plant of steel and 

 concrete construction 420 

 feet long by 120 feet wide 

 and the lumber, now manu- 

 factured from logs pur- 

 chased from contractors, 



moves on continuous tracks to a score or more of dif- 

 ferent machines which convert it into a score or more of 

 different wooden automobile parts. These in turn are 

 shipped to assembling plants back in the Detroit district 

 and in the course of a few weeks are part and parcel of 

 the finished Ford car to be seen on every highway in 

 every state in the whole United States. 



Why did Henry Ford buy this great tract of timber- 

 land, which in the aggregate is almost equal to the total 

 area of improved farm land in the whole northern penin- 

 sula? 



HENRY FORD'S FOREST IN NORTHERN MICHIGAN, SHOW- 

 ING CHARACTER OF THE HARDWOOD TIMBER. MR. 

 FORD IS GOING TO USE HIS FOREST, BUT HE IS GOING 

 TO KEEP TREES ALWAYS GROWING ON THE LAND. 



A Million Cars! A Million Trees! 



If you will take the trouble to investigate, you will 

 probably be surprised to find what a factor the forest is 

 in the making of Ford cars. Weight for weight, wood is 

 stronger than steel and Henry Ford's eternal quest is to 

 obtain the required strength and elasticity without having 

 to lug useless weight. It requires on the average 250 

 board feet of lumber for every car Ford manufactures. 



That is a pretty good lum- 

 ber content for the average 

 northern hardwood tree and 

 when you consider that Ford 

 is making around a million 

 cars a year, a forest of a 

 million trees a year begins 

 to pass before your eyes. 

 A sizable forest, indeed ! 

 Twenty-five thousand acres 

 of timber annually to Ford 

 the present generation from 

 one years end to another! 

 That will give some clue to 

 why Mr. Ford has bought a 

 big forest. 



"But is Henry Ford actu- 

 ally practicing forestry ?" 

 Among foresters and lum- 

 bermen and a lot of other 

 people, too, for that matter^ 

 this question has been asked 

 many times since announce- 

 ment of Ford's timberland 

 purchase was made. Some 

 of the lumbermen were in- 

 clined to shake their heads 

 and smile wisely. Most of 

 the foresters assumed a 

 hopeful attitude and tried 

 not to be skeptical. They 

 have been fooled before on 

 newspaper reports. But no 

 one seemed to know exactly how Henry Ford was setting 

 out to handle his newly acquired forest, so I went to Iron 

 Mountain to see for myself. And I found that in a very 

 serious minded way, he is harvesting his mature crop of 

 trees, leaving his young, fast growing trees for an on- 

 coming crop and ridding this young forest of the hazards 

 of fire by cleaning it of all brush resulting from logging. 

 If that isn't forestry, what is? 



The first man I talked to in Iron Mountain was Mr. 

 E. G. Kingsford, vice-president and general manager of 

 the subsidiary company which is conducting Mr. Ford's 



