2 OUR VANISHING FORESTS 



build and furnish a double row of five-room houses 

 which, spaced one hundred feet apart, would extend 

 all the way from New York to Seattle, south to San 

 Francisco and back again via New Orleans. What 

 do we use it for? First and foremost for making 

 homes. "Home Sweet Home" in America has al- 

 ways represented not a stone palace but a frame 

 cottage. More American houses are built of wood 

 than of brick, tile, stone or concrete all together. 

 Many so-called fireproof buildings and others which 

 do not show a wooden exterior have partitions, 

 window frames, interior finish, rafters and roofs of 

 wood, while stucco houses are often wood through- 

 out with merely an outer coating of plaster. 



Wood has been for many years and still remains 

 the cheapest form of building material. For beams, 

 joists and floors, it is the lightest and the most 

 easily workable. It lends itself readily to the at- 

 tractive results of painting and permits a variation 

 of individual taste running all the way from colonial 

 white to the darkies' idea of the aurora borealis. A 

 properly built wood house possesses excellent quali- 

 ties of insulation against heat or cold, and, indeed, 

 scientific tests have repeatedly shown that wood 

 houses can be kept cool in summer and warm in 

 winter at a minimum of expense. 



Are wood houses durable? The famous old 

 dwellings of New England dating back to Revolu- 



