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Forest Conditions. 

 Barnstable County lies in the white pine section of Hew 

 England. There are found today many large white pine stumps as 

 well as cedar stumps, proving that at one time Oape Cod was well 

 timbered. History tells us that one of the origina.l old-fashioned 

 saw-mills was situated in Barnstable. This saw-mill consists of 

 a deep shaft sunk in the earth on the bottom of which rested a 

 mechanism with a screw winch attached, the log being dropped into 

 the shaft and two men sawing the lumber at the mouth of the pit 

 as the log was raised by means of the screw winch, the sawyers 

 cutting out lumber required for building homes and many other uses, 

 but all that is passed and almost forgotten. Today we have very 

 little timber of merchantable size in Barnstable County. Forest 

 land is there ready for planting. The species found commonly are 

 pitch pine and scrub oak, but we found a few old plantations, two 

 in Orlea.ns and one in Wellfleet, in addition to the smaller planta- 

 tions made by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. These older 

 plantations consisted of white pine, red pine, Austrian, Scotch pine, 

 American larch, chestnut and pitch pine. In Tonset, which is a. 

 part of Orleans, there have been planted red spruce, white spruce, 

 maple, grey birch and catalpa. These had been planted a number of 

 years ago and are now all growing well. Vihite, red and black oak 

 were found in almost all parts of the Cape. In Falmouth I found 

 many varieties of trees, such as beech, white birch, hickory, tulip 

 and sour gum. In Barnstable and Harwich I found considerable beech 

 mixed in with oak and other types of hardwoods. On account of the 



