NORTH CAROLINA FORESTRY ASSOCIATION » 



The reading of the minutes of the last meeting was dispensed with, 

 and the Secretary then read his annual report, which follows : 



SECRETARY'S REPORT 



By J. S. Holmes, Forester, North Carolina Geological and 



Economic Survey. 



Since the organization of the North Carolina Forestry Association a year 



ago, much has been done by it to lay a foundation on which can be built a 



more general and intelligent appreciation of North Carolina's forest wealth 



and of the necessity for protecting it. 



A large amount of correspondence has been carried on in the effort to 

 secure a vice-president in every Senatorial District of the State. This 

 finally resulted in the acceptance of this position by prominent men in 

 thirty-four out of the thirty-nine districts. The other five districts have so 

 far no representatives in our Association, but suitable men will be selected 

 as soon as possible. 



A meeting of the Executive Committee was called for September 21st last, 

 the vice-presidents also being invited to attend. At this meeting a constitu- 

 tion, which will be submitted to this meeting for final adoption, was approved. 

 The work of the Association for the winter was discussed, and two or three 

 special lines of work were decided upon. Realizing the value of information 

 in regard to the number of forest fires occurring in the State and the annual 

 damage done by them, it was determined that this Association cooperate 

 with the North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey in the collection of 

 these figures in order if possible to increase their scope and reliability. In 

 conformity with this decision, your Secretary sent out a request to all the 

 vice-presidents, asking them to submit a list of men, one or more from each 

 township in the several counties of their districts, who would be likely to 

 answer questions about the damage done by forest fires during the past year. 

 Preparing such a list means considerable work, but nine of the vice- 

 presidents submitted lists covering twenty-four counties. Questions were 

 subsequently sent one man in each township on these lists, and the full 

 returns from these counties seem to thoroughly justify this work. I hope 

 that another year a similar list can be had from every district in the State.* 

 As one of the objects of this Association is to promote the protection of 

 the forests of the State from destructive insects, at the suggestion of the 

 Association, two of its vice-presidents called meetings in their own districts 

 last fall for the purpose of inaugurating a campaign to control the ravages 

 of the Southern pine beetle, which have been so destructive to the second 

 growth pine forests of the southern Piedmont counties. The vice-president 

 of the Twenty-fifth District, Mr. W. S. Lee, called a meeting to be held in 

 Charlotte on November 25th last. This resulted in the organization of the 

 Mecklenburg Pine Beetle Association, which I understand has been doing 

 splendid work during the present winter in the control of this insect. Mr. 

 A. C. Stroup, vice-president of the Thirty-second District, called a meeting 

 for December the 5th in Gastonia, and this meeting organized itself into the 

 Gaston Forestry Association, the primary object of which was to stop the 



♦The report on Forest Fires in North Carolina during 1911 is published as a second part of this 

 Economic Paper. 



