26 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



wasteful things. Those two trees made five hundred feet 

 of inch boards. Now, if my judgment is good (it ought 

 to be, for I was almost brought up in the woods and in a 

 saw-mill), that clump of pines will malve at the rate of fifty- 

 four thousand feet of inch boards to the acre. The trees 

 now average over thirteen inches in diameter, four feet from 

 the ground, and, of the two I cut, one was eighty feet in 

 height and tlie other seventy-two feet six inches. I have 

 had the trees trimmed so that there are no limbs within 

 twenty feet of the ground. I think no one will deny that 

 that timber is worth five dollars on the stump by the 

 thousand, and if there are fift}" thousand feet, — and I have 

 no dou])t l)ut there are more, —it is very easy for you all to 

 see how it has gained in vahie since I purchased it, when I 

 doubt if I could have sold it for a dollar an acre. When 

 these pines are cut off and that land is left, you can buy the 

 land for fifty cents an acre. I mention this simply as a 

 sample of what can be done. I judge the average age of 

 these pines to be fifty years. They ought to have been 

 thinned earlier and oftener, and consequently been larger. 



You recollect Mr. Jewell, speaker of your House of Rep- 

 resentatives. His brother, living in New Hampshire, gath- 

 ered twelve l)U8hel8 of pine cones and scattered them over the 

 grass sod of two and a half acres of worn-out pasture land. 

 This was in the autumn of 184D. I went there in 1891, and 

 saw one of the handsomest pine groves that I had ever seen. 

 Two trees were cut so that we could arrive at correct conclu- 

 sions, and I concluded that the trees averaged sixty-six feet 

 in height and eleven inches in diameter four feet from the 

 ground. Now, that land when those trees are taken oft* may 

 possibly be worth one or two dollars an acre, at the market 

 price there. These trees would have been larger if they had 

 been thinned earlier and oftener. 



But one of the best examples, indeed, the most interesting 

 I know of, is in your own State. I have been twice to En- 

 field, Conn., to see the pin-es sowed by Omar Pease. He 

 was a Shaker. I saw various places on these plains where 

 there was no sod on the ground whatever, although most of 

 the plains uncovered by pines had a light sod. He ploughed 

 the land and sowed it to rye, and harrowed the rye in. Then 



