The areas considered in connection with this inquiry as to the pos- 

 sibility of restoring the forests are located, some areas small, some large 

 in all the northern counties above a line drawn from Saginaw Bay to 

 Lake Michigan, taking in, as the southern tier of counties in the area 

 to be examined, Arenac, Gladwin, Clare, Osceola, Lake and Mason. This 

 means all north Michigan, including the upper peninsula 42 counties. 

 Just as there are some of the best lands in the state north of this line, 

 notably in the Upper Peninsula, there are bankrupt lands below it. But 

 the area defined is logically to be called the area wherein lies the bank- 

 rupt lands of Michigan. 



REVERTING TO STATE. 



Corporations and individuals own by far the largest number of acres, 

 and their holdings include vast areas of non-productive lands. These 

 are the cut-over timber lands, memento of the by-gone lumber industry, 

 standing idle, fire-swept from year to year, on the books, of course, as 

 an asset as a matter of fact when the interests of the whole state and 

 all its people are considered, a liability. Among these private holdings 

 are millions of acres verging from those on the assessors' books at $5 an 

 acre or less to the ones which the owners are allowing to revert to the 

 state because of non-payment of taxes. What private persons own, 

 exactly, as to the number of acres, is not so important except from this 

 last consideration as a reservoir from which flows a continuous stream 

 of acreage into the state's ownership. It is with state ownership that 

 the present problem has to do, as of first consideration. It is the land 

 to which they themselves hold title that the people of Michigan can re- 

 gard as the first element in the problem of what to do to make the 

 idle acres again grow trees. What private persons do or won't do can 

 be forgotten for the time being. The state has its own land, idle, non- 

 productive, and public attention can with most profit be turned in 

 that direction. 



The public owned lands are of several sorts. State tax lands are 

 of largest volume. There are University and Agricultural College 

 lands, and Federal areas of comparatively small size. It is the state 

 tax lands af which, and to the administration of which, the people of 

 Michigan must look for practical experimentation in the labor of re- 

 storing the idle lands to profitable use. 



SOME IS RESOLD. 



When private owners have failed to pay taxes for five years the 

 land involved may by law be deemed abandoned, and it becomes state 

 property. .The Auditor-General gets it. He has thus acquired, for 

 the people of the state, 2,300,000 acres since 1893. The reversion of 

 this "five-year" land to the state is continuous, reversions occurring 

 daily. The process of bankruptcy of these lands goes steadily on. The 

 rate of reversion is about 3,000 acres a month. 



Some of the land the Auditor-General resells a very small propor- 

 tion; some he trades for other lands of similar value in order to group 

 up the state's holdings, but the great bulk of the increasing estate has 

 gone into and continues to go into the hands of the Public Domain 

 Commission. 



Here is where the active work of "doing something" with the 

 bankrupt lands of Michigan is going on. What this commission is 

 doing, its plans and accomplishments, and the possibilities of accom- 

 plishment afford the outstanding, concrete example of what could and 

 should be done with the entire 10.000,000 acres of idle land within 

 the state. There, reclamation has begun. There it is planned to 

 re-establish the forests of Michigan. 



