CHIEF FIRE WARDEN. 21 



PROFITS FROM GROWING PINE. 



A bulletin on the white pine lately published by the 

 Division of Forestry, Washington, shows that in Plym- 

 outh and Bristol counties, Massachusetts, pine thirty-five 

 years old measured nearly a foot in diameter, and that 

 the land, which without the pine would be worth only I3 

 to #10 per acre, was worth with the standing pine $50 to 

 $75 or more per acre, according to location. 



I know of a farm of 300 acres on the Connecticut river, 

 in Vermont, which was offered for sale a year ago for 

 $15,000; yet, recently, just the standing pine on it was 

 sold for 114,000. The owner had not before understood 

 its value. This pine had grown in a man's life time. If 

 the Minnesota farmers, even in the prairie regions, would 

 plant a few acres of white pine on their poorest dry soil, it 

 would add value to their property and beautify their land- 

 scape. On our poorest sandy soil it will take, as before 

 stated, on an average, probably eighty years for a crop of 

 pine to grow to merchantable size; but it will not make 

 as good lumber as the virgin pine now being cut in Min- 

 nesota that has been growing from 100 to' 300 years and 

 which, when removed, we shall never see its like again. 



At Greenfield, N. H., last summer I saw a twenty-acre 

 tract of standing white pine that had just been sold for 

 1 1,800, 190 an acre. It was not agricultural land, but a 

 rocky hillside. Very few of the pines exceeded a foot and 

 a half in diameter. They had all come up from natural 

 seeding and their average age probably did not exceed 

 fifty years. The trees were being cut and sawed by a 

 portable steam mill into boards, which were shipped by 

 railroad to the city of Lowell, forty miles distant. The 

 amount of timber in the tract was sold at an estimate of 

 600,000 feet, so that the price per 1,000 feet was only 13, 

 which, considering that the railroad station is only two 

 miles distant by good road, seems very cheap. The ends 



