104 AMERICAN FOREST TREES 



thickets so dense as to be almost impenetrable. Southern white cedar 

 is cut in ten or twelve states, but the annual supply is not known, 

 because mills generally report all cedars as one, and the regions which 

 produce this, produce one or more other species of cedar also. It has 

 held its place nearly three hundred years, and much interesting history 

 is connected with it. A considerable part of the Revolutionary war 

 was fought with powder made from white cedar charcoal burned in 

 New Jersey and Delaware. However, that was by no means the earliest 

 place filled by this wood. 



Two hundred years ago in North Carolina John Lawson wrote of 

 its use for "yards, topmasts, booms, bowsprits for boats, shingles, and 

 poles." It was cut for practically the same purposes in New Jersey at 

 an earlier period, and 160 years ago Gottleib Mittelberger, when he 

 visited Philadelphia, declared that white cedar was being cut at a rate 

 which would soon exhaust the supply. But that prophecy, like similar 

 predictions that oak and red cedar were about gone, proved not well 

 founded. Seventy years after the imminent exhaustion of this wood 

 was foretold, William Cobbett, an English traveler, declared with 

 evident exaggeration that "all good houses in the United States" were 

 roofed with white cedar shingles. 



After boat building, the first general use of the southern white 

 cedar was for fences and farm buildings, and doubtless twenty times as 

 much went to the farms as to the boat yards. In all regions where the 

 wood was convenient, little other was employed as fencing material, and 

 many of the earliest houses in New Jersey and some in Pennsylvania were 

 constructed almost wholly of this wood. Small trees which would split 

 two, three, and four rails to the cut, were mauled by thousands to enclose 

 the farms. The bark soon dropped off, or was removed, and the light 

 rails quickly air-dried, and decay made little impression on them for 

 many years. The larger trunks were rived for shingles or were sawed 

 into lumber. About 1750 the use of round cedar logs for houses and 

 barns began to give way to sawed lumber. It was an ideal milling 

 timber, for the logs were symmetrical, clear, and easily handled. North 

 Carolina sawmills were at work on this timber many years before the 

 Revolution. It was acceptable material for doors, window frames, 

 rafters, and floors, but especially for shingles which were split with frow 

 and mallet, and were from twenty-four to twenty-seven niches long. 

 They were known in market as juniper shingles and sold at four and 

 five dollars a thousand. About 1750 builders in Philadelphia were 

 criticized because they constructed houses with no provision for other 

 than white cedar roofs ; the walls being too weak for heavier material 

 which would have to be substituted when cedar could be no longer 



