COST-VALUE OF LAND 3 1 



b. Conditions of property and business itself: 

 Size of property, term of investment, regularity of income, 

 safety of property and income. 



b. Cost-value and sale-value of land or soil in forest 

 properties in the United States. 



Aside from the sales of small woodlots, etc., it is generally 

 true that the land itself is not considered in sales of timber. In the 

 past and even at the present time it is the common practice in buy- 

 ing and selling timberlands to estimate the merchantable timber or 

 the stuff now ready for ax and market and to set a price only on 

 this marketable material leaving out of consideration both the land 

 and the growing stock smaller than merchantable. In many cases 

 even part of the large timber is considered non-merchantable and 

 is not paid for. For instance, balsam, cedar and oak in California, 

 hemlock and balsam in the northwest, Douglas fir and balsam in the 

 northern Rockies, hardwoods in the northeast, gum and other hard- 

 woods in the south. 



Generally, then, the cost value and the sale value of forest lands 

 in the real forest districts of the United States is practically nothing. 

 In the Great Lakes Region millions of acres were simply abandoned 

 by the lumbermen after the timber had been cut and allowed to re- 

 vert for non-payment of taxes. Of late these lands are turned over 

 to some land company, often the same men, to sell to settlers. In 

 the south millions of acres of cutover lands can be bought at less 

 than three dollars per acre though there is a remnant of tree growth 

 usually worth the price paid for the land. Michigan and Wisconsin 

 and Ontario have sold millions of acres in the last twenty years at 

 prices generally not over one dollar per acre and in these cases, too, 

 the land was bought more for the remnants of timber than the land 

 itself. 



New York bought over one and one-half million acres of land, 

 over seventy-five per cent covered with timber, at about three dol- 

 lars and sixty cents ; Pennsylvania bought about a million acres at 

 two dollars and twenty-seven cents ; Pisgah forest of eighty thous- 

 and acres was bought in 1914 at five dollars for land and timber 

 and over thirty thousand acres in the White Mountains were bought 

 at about four and a half dollars an acre, though in both cases nu- 

 merous old abandoned farms were included, and the remaining tim- 

 ber is worth the price paid. In 191 5 a tract of over thirty-six thous- 

 and acres in North Carolina was bought at one dollar and ninety 

 cents an acre for land and timber. 



