222 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 432. 



of a few caretakers clothed with police authority would be 

 all the protection needed until the people began to appre- 

 ciate the value of a public playground, and the strong 

 public sentiment for protecting it would soon be estab- 

 lished. In older countries the people have the freedom of 

 many of the most splendid parks and woods in the world. 

 The greens or squares in our little villages are not defaced, 

 for everybody cares for them and public buildings suffer 

 little wanton defacement. The same would probably be 

 true of larger grounds, so that the necessary requirements 

 and restrictions in their use would be obediently and grate- 

 fully complied with as soon as the people realized that 

 these grounds were their own, and that they were dedicated 

 forever to the enjoyment of themselves and their children. 



The remarkable increase of bicycle riding in the past 

 year adds a new menace to suburban gardens and 

 orchards. Bicycle riders returning to town from the 

 country with big bunches of flowers tied to their handle- 

 bars are familiar objects in the suburbs of all our large 

 cities. It is safe to assume that a large part of these flow- 

 ers have been gathered without the consent of their owners. 

 Pilfering of this sort is often the result of ignorance or 

 thoughtlessness, and the press of the country can do a real 

 service in teaching a stricter morality than now prevails in 

 the United States upon this point. Flower-stealing, how- 

 ever, is not always the result of ignorance, and it is not an 

 uncommon sight to see women driven by liveried servants 

 with carriage-loads of stolen flowers. Such women have 

 not the excuse of poverty to plead in explanation of their 

 thefts, and no amount of teaching, unless it comes through 

 the judges of police courts, will enlighten their minds on 

 this point. People who grow flowers are always willing 

 to share them with their less fortunate neighbors, as the 

 success of the flower missions throughout the country 

 abundantly proves, but no one, however public-spirited or 

 generous, likes to be taken advantage of or to see his trees 

 and shrubs broken to pieces, or to feel that any rare or 

 interesting plant, whose development he is watching, may 

 be pulled up by some vandal who is very likely to throw 

 it away again before he has carried it a hundred yards, thus 

 adding insult to injury. This ignorance and lawlessness, 

 where plants and flowers are concerned, are serious draw- 

 backs to the cultivation of gardens near our cities, and 

 they cast well-deserved reproach on people who would not 

 take five cents' worth of anything else which did not be- 

 long to them. This evil is increasing every year, and it is 

 liable to increase until public sentiment against it is thor- 

 oughly aroused, and laws against depredations of this 

 character are promptly and rigorously enforced. 



Hemlock for the Tanneries. 



IN north-western Pennsylvania the bark-peeling of the 

 Hemlock-trees begins early in May and continues 

 through the summer until the middle of August, and 

 during that time thousands of trees are destroyed and 

 miles of rich woodland denuded. There is no more 

 destructive process to the wooded sections of the country 

 than that of bark-peeling, and unless something is done 

 soon the fine forests of Hemlock in Jefferson, Clearfield, 

 Elk, McKean, Warren, Forest, Cameron and Potter coun- 

 ties will be destroyed from the face of the earth. In recent 

 years the discovery and cultivation of Canaigre in the south- 

 west have promised some abatement of the injury to the 

 forests, but it will be a long time before the Hemlock will 

 cease to be the most profitable source of tannic acid. 



Several large tanneries have been erected in the northern 

 tiers of counties, and since 1872 the industry has been a 

 large and thriving one here. Several of them consume the 

 hemlock bark that grows on a thousand acres of wood- 

 land every year. When the first tanneries were erected 

 the trees were stripped of their bark while standing and left 

 to die and decay in this condition. There may be seen 



miles and miles of these skeleton trees to-day, but such a 

 wasteful process is no longer pursued. When the Pine 

 timber of Pennsylvania became exhausted, a new value 

 was given to the Hemlock-trees, since the owner of the 

 sawmill will not only sell the lumber but supply the tan- 

 neries with bark. In some cases the tanneries erect their 

 own sawmills. 



An early spring starts the sap in May and loosens the 

 bark so that it can be peeled off easily. Then the men go 

 into the woods by the hundred. The bark-peeling is done 

 altogether by contract. One contractor engages his men, 

 and makes an agreement with the tanneries to supply so 

 many cords of bark. The contractor has to cut roads 

 through the woods that will admit of sleighs in winter and 

 carts in summer, and the products of his men's labor must 

 be piled close to these roads. His contract is a cast-iron 

 one, and he has to live up to it to the very letter. A cord, 

 according to the tanneries, contains 2,200 pounds, and 

 when measured in volume it must be eight feet long, four 

 feet high and four feet wide. Sometimes the contractor 

 agrees to cut and cure the bark by weight, and then much 

 bark can be used that is not the regulation length of four 

 feet. 



It takes about two thousand feet of logs to peel a cord 

 of bark, and on the average in the Hemlock forests of 

 northern Pennsylvania it takes one acre to produce ten 

 cords of bark and 20,000 feet of logs. The contractor 

 makes roads through the forests about sixty feet apart, and 

 the logs and bark are piled between them. When the forest 

 runs up on the sides of the hills and mountains the felled 

 trees have to be trimmed and carted down to the roads in 

 the valley, making the work doubly difficult. The peelers 

 go into the woods in gangs of four and cut down the trees, 

 trim off the limbs, peel the bark off, and cut them into the 

 proper size logs. Each gang is composed of two log-cut- 

 ters, one spudder and one fitter. The fitter goes first and 

 selects his tree and cuts a ring around it through the bark 

 close to the roots, and then another four feet up ; the bark 

 is then split down one side from ring to ring, and thespud- 

 der comes along and inserts his spud into the slit ; with a 

 few deft strokes he peels off the whole piece of bark as 

 clean as a boy rings a chestnut-whistle when the sap is 

 flowing in the spring of the year. 



The choppers then follow, and with their axes and saws 

 they soon bring the tree to the ground. The tree is 

 trimmed when it has fallen. The fitter measures off the 

 bark on the giant tree, and the spudder peels it off the 

 same as before, and then the logs are cut to the length 

 desired. 



In this way the gangs of men will go through the Hem- 

 lock forests, each set of four peeling off from five to eight 

 cords of bark a day and cutting the trees up into logs. One 

 such gang will peel 250 cords of bark in a season and cut 

 half a million feet of logs. The sawmills are ready to 

 work as soon as the bark-peeling begins, and one good 

 mill will eat up the logs from 250 acres in one year. The 

 hemlock lumber cut in northern Pennsylvania in this way 

 amounts to over 80,000,000 feet in a season. This means 

 that over 40,000 cords of bark are peeled and 4,000 acres of 

 forests stripped in a year. 



The fitters, spudders and wood-choppers in the Hemlock 

 forests receive only moderate wages, although the work is 

 probably the hardest connected with lumbering. The 

 ruling prices paid to bark-peelers is $1.25 per day and 

 board, but good spudders can secure $2.00. The jobber 

 who takes the contract receives about $1.35 to $1.50 per 

 cord for gathering the bark, and from forty to fifty cents a 

 thousand for the cut logs. This jobber then employs his 

 men, and expects to make his wages in getting good 

 work out of them. The tanners own most of the woods, 

 and these prices are merely paid to the men for gathering 

 the bark and cutting the logs. The bark-peelers are a 

 typical class of men, who make their wages in gathering 

 the hemlock-bark in summer and live by gunning and 

 doing odd jobs in winter. 



