THE PINE INVESTIGATION. 277 



"cove" in his forest land, and remarked that it was the largest 

 tree of the kind that he had ever seen. I was forcibly im- 

 pressed with its size and beauty, and often stopped to admire 

 it during my hunting expeditions in the primitive forest in 

 which it grew. It was a magnificent specimen, evidently over 

 four feet in diameter, and not less than one hundred and twenty 

 feet tall, apparently one hundred feet of which was a straight, 

 limbless trunk, probabty as large twenty feet up the trunk as it 

 was at the base. There were also at this time a large number of 

 yellow and pitch pines in this same forest, but none nearly so 

 large as this. A few years after my attention was first called to 

 this tree, I noticed that it had a peculiar appearance, and upon 

 examination I found that the woodpeckers had removed all of 

 the thin, flaky, outer bark from the trunk, and that the bark was 

 punctured with innumerable holes resembling shot holes. Up- 

 on removing a piece of the bark it was found to be grooved in 

 all directions by bark mining insects, and that the tree had re- 

 cently died evidently from injury by the insects. The tree was 

 soon after cut and worked into shingles in order to prevent the 

 total loss of its valuable wood. 



This tree was evidently a surviving representative of the 

 vast quantities of this kind of timber that once grew through- 

 out the southwestern sections of the State, forming in the 

 most favorable localities nearly pure forests of the species, and 

 occurring in other sections in a mixed growth of hardwood and 

 other kinds of pine. 



PRESENT DISTRIBUTION AND CONDITION OF THE PINE IN THE STATE. 



At present the occurrence and distribution of the best types 

 of the different species of pine are restricted to a few scattering 

 individuals and small forests in Morgan, Hampshire, Mineral, 

 Grant and Fendleton counties and the south-western portion of 

 the State, and a few primitive forests of white pine which oc- 

 cur in Raleigh and Greenbrier counties. There is a consider- 

 able amount of young seedling or scrubby growth of white, 

 yellow, pitch and scrub pine in all of the sections mentioned, 



