35 



of hill lands of southern Indiana there can be no reasonable doubt thai 

 as the trees have been removed there have been greater and greater floods ; 

 and now as the forests have almost entirely disappeared the floods have 

 become exceedingly destructive. Dwelling houses that had stood above 

 the highest waters of the streams for half a century have, within the 

 last decade, since the higher prices for timber have caused the more 

 rapid disappearance of the trees, been inundated repeatedly and many 

 of them carried away. Bottom lands that twenty years ago had a deep 

 and fertile soil are now almost worthless. The flood waters have carried 

 away the greater part of the tillable earth and left in its place stones and 

 gravel. In other places the alluvium of the bottoms has been covered 

 by material from the hills. Thousands of acres of such land, which a 

 few years ago was the most fertile and valuable in the State, are now 

 undesirable. 



Hand in hand with the flooded conditions and consequent destruction 

 caused by the larger streams has gone the loss of soil by erosion from the 

 deforested hill lands. It is no exaggeration to say that, from the greater 

 number of hill farms placed under cultivation a quarter of a century ago, 

 there has been removed on the average a foot of soil, and from many 

 slopes there has been taken three or four times, as much. Tens of thou- 

 sands of acres of the steeper hillsides have been denuded of their soil 

 covering and are at present valueless for ordinary agricultural purposes. 

 How to prevent this denudation is the most serious problem that the hill 

 farmer has to solve. In many cases a single heavy rain in February or 

 March, when the departing frost has left the ground in its least compact 

 condition, has been known to remove from a whole slope an average of 

 four or five inches of the soil. Fields that before the rain were consid- 

 ered good farming land were left so covered with rocks, and with so little 

 soil, that they were practically abandoned. Farmers among the hill lands 

 are realizing more and more that a loss of soil is the most serious of prop- 

 erty losses, since a damage of this character cannot be repaired except by 

 the ordinary processes of nature, which require scores and even hundreds 

 of years. Farm after farm in southern Indiana, considered very valuable 

 thirty years ago, is practically deserted today. The population of this 

 region first occupied the hills, and considered the soils of the flats and 

 divides very undesirable. For many years now, however, the tide of move- 

 ment of the people has been from the hills to the flat or gently rolling 



