ORIGINAL FORESTS AND THEIR EARLY DEVELOPMENT 191 



impossible. Most of it was rented under permanent leases. 

 Bowdoin College received a grant of six townships from the 

 Legislature of Maine. 



During the first half of the nineteenth century the white pine 

 lumber industry grew to immense proportions. Before this time 

 the rural parts of southern New England had begun to be 

 depopulated, and gradually lands on the hillsides of Vermont 

 and New Hampshire were abandoned for farm purposes. When 

 the country districts had been well inhabited a great amount of 

 wood was used as fuel by the farmers. Many of the early 

 manufacturing industries also used large quantities of charcoal. 

 For the production of these fuel supphes great forest regions 

 such as the whole western part of Connecticut and Massachusetts 

 were cut over again and again. President Dwight of Yale, who 

 traveled extensively throughout New England in the early part 

 of the nineteenth century, describes a system common in Con- 

 necticut at that time of allowing the sprouts of chestnut and oak 

 to grow for fifteen or twenty years and then cutting them off for 

 wood. Unquestionably the more accessible regions were cut 

 again and again in this way. But when the farm population had 

 fallen off greatly, much of this demand for wood ceased. About 

 the same time railroads were built and coal was introduced for 

 fuel for manufacturing purposes. Wood lots which had been cut 

 close were allowed to grow up, and the increased area given up 

 to brush resulting in an oversupply of fuel, a drop in the price 

 followed, so that fuel wood is now not worth cutting in many 

 sections of New England, where formerly it was worth from $1 

 to $2 a cord standing. Gradually a demand grew for larger 

 materials, as railroad ties, telephone, telegraph, and electric- 

 hght poles, and these are now among the chief products of the 

 chestnut and oak forests of southern New England. 



The first steam engines burned wood, and many a hillside of 

 Vermont and New Hampshire was stripped of its forest to meet 

 this demand. The original settlers of the more remote localities 

 got no other returns from their forests, which were destroyed to 

 make room for agriculture, than that furnished by the potash 



