90 The Forest Products Laboratory 



"LEGISLATIVE MEASURES FOR FOREST 

 CONSERVATION" 



Emanuel L. Philipp, Governor of Wisconsin 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen : 



In belialf of the state I Avant to bid you welcome, particularly 

 those of you who have come from other states and from other sections 

 of this state to this meeting. It is an important meeting in many ways 

 and one which will result, I am sure, in some good. I welcome you 

 to this great university, the capital, and our state in general; and I 

 hope that when you leave here the j^eople and the surroundings that 

 you have been in will leave a good and lasting impression upon you. 



To me has been assigned the subject of "Legislative Measures for 

 Forest Conservation". Before I attempt to speak upon that subject, 

 however, I am going to review briefly what I believe to be the waste 

 of forest materials during the nineteenth century. I do this because 

 I was reared in the state of Wisconsin ; I knew something of the timber 

 supply of earlier days; I have been a lumberman, and I am going to 

 speak to you from tlie lumberman's standpoint, not only of the waste 

 in Wisconsin, but of the waste that we have seen in other states, par- 

 ticularly in the South, and the new conditions and the better under- 

 standing that the people no whave of timber values since the^^ began 

 to see it disappear. I think that would better illustrate the necessity 

 of legislation for timber conservation than mere legislative discussion 

 of the subject. 



The state of Wisconsin, as you all know, had a great timl^er 

 supply. I think back to the sixties when men went to tlie nortliern 

 pineries, bought forty acres of land, and cut around that forty acres 

 for three or four years. That was a common custom. There was so 

 much timber in northern Wisconsin that it was the general belief 

 among our citizens that the supply was inexhaustible. To that sup- 

 ply was added the then only partially-known supply of northern Min- 

 nesota and the great supply in the state of Michigan. There was so 

 much timber to be had and lumber was necessarily so cheap that only 

 the very best qualities could be used and sold for a very common and 



