202 FORESTS OF NORTH CAROLINA. 



These forests require the same management and care for their 

 improvement, as was indicated for those of the compact red loams. 



GENERAL CONDITION OF THE DECIDUOUS FORESTS OF THE PIEDMONT 



PLATEAU REGION. 



Between 80,000 and 100,000 acres of oak and hickory woodland 

 situated in Person, Caswell, and Granville counties were burned in 

 the spring of 1893. The greater portion of the mature and large- 

 sized oak and hickory timber was killed ; and while the tops of 

 all smaller trees were destroyed, they put forth abundant stool 

 shoots so that the burnt areas are now covered with thickets of 

 young sprouts. There is another large burnt area in the north- 

 eastern portion of Rockingham county over which a fire passed 

 about 1875. This is now covered with a thick growth of small 

 trees about twenty years old, there often being several stocks 

 from the same stool so that they interfere with each other and 

 prevent development. 



While at the present time, on account of the general distribu- 

 tion of groves of seed-bearing short leaf pine, this species quickly 

 forms a stand in abandoned fields, as is the case from Rutherford, 

 Cleveland, and Mecklenburg counties north to Davie and Guil- 

 ford, yet in many portions of southern Alamance, the northern 

 parts of Orange, in Person, Caswell, and the eastern parts of 

 Rockingham and Forsyth counties, the short-leaf pine does nut 

 rapidly take old fields, from five to ten years or even more 

 being required for a thick stand to be naturally secured. 



In the eastern portion of Guilford county, and in Alamance, 

 Orange, Person, and Forsyth there is a large proportion of red 

 -cedar associated with the short-leaf pine, in localities where the 

 pine does occur in the old field growth ; but the cedar is finally 

 suppressed by overshading. In some localities cedar unmixed 

 with other trees forms the regrowth. This tree is also rapidly 

 increasing in culled woods, but, as in the pine groves, it is unable 

 to endure the deep shade of the broad-leaf trees, being of much 

 slower growth than they, and is at last overshaded. In the coun- 

 ties to the west of Guilford, and especially in those to the south- 

 west, there is not so much red cedar. 



