374 THE PLANT LIFE OF MARYLAND 



whereas it was once an important species in the mountain forests, 

 and would be today except for destructive logging methods. After 

 white pine and spruce were cut out attention was then directed to 

 the hardwoods, and so for thirty years there has been a thorough 

 culling of the forests for the best of the hardwood timber until few 

 of the original stands remain. The usual method of logging is to 

 run a light narrow gauge railroad up the river and stream valleys, 

 and to gather in from the adjacent slopes all of the merchantable 

 timber. In the early logging operations the term merchantable tim- 

 ber did not have the same significance that it has now. Then only 

 the larger trees were taken, and much sound timber was left in the 

 woods in tree tops and crooked logs because it would not pay for 

 hauling. Under present market conditions, practically every sound 

 stick big enough for a mine prop (4" at top end and 8 feet long) is 

 cut, leaving little but the sprouting capacity of the stumps them- 

 selves as a nucleous for a new growth. This in itself, would not be 

 an unmitigated evil, but repeated forest fires usually prevent the nat- 

 ural growth from attaining anything like a fully stocked stand, 

 therebj- destroying the chance of a new forest replacing the old one. 



The principal forest products are lumber, mine props, railroad and 

 mine ties and hemlock and chestnut-oak bark. Practically all species 

 are cut for lumber, but the principal ones are white oak, red oak, 

 chestnut, hemlock, maple basswood and spruce. The bulk of the 

 lumber is cut by large mills — a number of which have a daily ca- 

 pacity of forty thousand feet or more. 



An immense quantity of mine props is cut from the smaller trees 

 on the timber tracts to supply the nearby coal mining regions. In 

 addition to mine props a large quantity of timber is cut into mine 

 rails, mine ties, etc. A few years ago, while there were still large 

 areas of hemlock timber in this section, the production of hemlock 

 bark was an important business, and local tanneries were numerous. 

 With the exhaustion of the hemlock stands, most of the tanneries have 

 gone out of business, and only a small quantity of hemlock bark is 

 produced. This all comes from the local lumbering operations where 

 occasional stands of hemlock are lumbered. 



