PART II. 

 NEW ENGLAND FORESTS AND THEIR MANAGEMENT. 



CHAPTER XL 



THE ORIGINAL FORESTS AND THEIR EARLY DEVELOPMENT. 



While the early history of New England abounds with ref- 

 erences to the forest, they are unsatisfactory as far as yielding 

 light on the real character of those forests. We can, however, 

 gain a fair picture of them from the records of the early forest 

 industries and from the laws which were passed regulating their 

 use. 



There can be no question that there was an immense white 

 pine forest stretching across Massachusetts to the foot of the 

 Berkshires and extending well up the rivers of Maine and to Lake 

 Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire. It reached still farther 

 north through the Connecticut valley and its tributaries, such 

 as the Ammonoosuc and Passumpsic, and from the borders of 

 Lake Champlain as far inland as the base of the Green Moun- 

 tains. On the better soils, hardwoods were frequently mixed with 

 the pines; birch, maple, beech in the north; oak, hickory, chest- 

 nut in the south. On some of the drier sandy lands the pitch 

 pine was perhaps even more common than the white pine, as in 

 the Cape Cod district and the Connecticut valley near Hartford. 



The pine was always confined to the warmer soils and seldom 

 reached good development on elevations exceeding 1500 feet. 

 Bordering the pine country in the north or in the mountains was 

 spruce, forming pure forests throughout much of the northern 

 portion of Maine and of the White Mountains, but usually mixed, 

 in Vermont, with the hardwoods. Even in the swamps and 



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