VOCATIONAL FORESTRY EDUCATION 



739 



statute for the part-time education of children between 

 14 and 18. The same is true also of the sawmill and 

 wood-working industries, and there is no reason why 

 an evening school should not be developed in connection 

 with every large wood-working establishment in the 

 country. 



Perhaps the best plan under which to carry on the 

 vocational work in lumbering, surveying, cruising, wood 

 manufacture and paper making would be for several 

 teachers to work out from the State Forest School. If 

 a short course of three months were thought advisable, 

 one teacher would be able to conduct four schools dur- 

 ing the year. Experts in the various phases of forestry 

 might, under such a plan, be detailed from the United 

 States Forest Service to different states to assist in these 

 schools. The result would be a widening field of ac- 

 tivity for the Forest Service and the State Schools, and 

 would do more than any other factor to promote forest 

 production and wood conservation in the United States. 



in the course of a few years begins to bear a crop of 

 nuts almost every year. The very dark wood is fitted for 

 many uses about the farm or is readily salable for cabi- 

 net work and ornamental purposes. While it takes years 

 to produce the valuable hardwood in merchantable sizes 



"UNCLE BILL" SAYS "PLANT BLACK 

 WALNUT" 



pOLONEL CROSBY, of Washington, D. C, better 

 ^ known to the Boy Scouts as "Uncle Bill," is devoting 

 the "best" years of his long life to getting the Scouts and 

 other boys and girls to plant some black walnut on the 

 home place. He grew up in the magnificent hardwood 

 forests east of Columbus, Ohio, where his boyhood was 

 spent in the companionship of trees, which he has 

 never lost. 



During four years in the "Sixties" as a soldier boy in 

 Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, 

 and since as a business man and newspaper correspond- 

 ent, he has continuously been a student, an observer, and 

 writer about trees. "The black walnut," he says, "for 

 stateliness and beauty has no superior and few equals. 

 In point of general usefulness and utility it has no equal 

 among the trees of all the world. It was because of its 

 superiority as building material and its resistance to 

 decay that it was first selected for destruction by the 

 early settlers. Next it became the favorite wood for 

 household ornamentation, and for furniture; with result 

 that it was more sought after than any other American 

 wood. And finally came the World War, when every 

 gunmaker in the world set out to get walnut to make 

 gunstocks out of, with the result that the walnut tree, of 

 suitable size for timber has about disappeared." 



Uncle Bill is going about asking the Scouts to gather 

 every walnut they can find, store them up in damp sand 

 in a box or barrel in the cellar and next spring plant 

 them out in odd corners about the farm. The reason for 

 not planting the seed this fall is that "Happy Jack," the 

 gray squirrel, or "Chatter," the red squirrel, will almost 

 surely smell them and dig them up when the ground is 

 not frozen too hard. 



He explains that the walnut requires a good deep soil 

 supplied with abundant moisture such as found in de- 

 pressions or along stream banks or bottoms. When 

 started there the walnut makes a fairly rapid growth and 



"UNCLE BILLY" AND TWO OF HIS MANY ENTHUSIASTIC FRIENDS 



This is Colonel Crosby, better known as "Uncle Bill" to the boys 



and girls of America. 



meanwhile the tree is hardy, beautiful and profitable. 

 "My aim," says Uncle Bill, "is to restore the black 

 walnut to the position which it formerly occupied over 

 much of the Eastern United States as the Kjng of 

 American Trees." 



