FISHERIES, GAME AND FORESTS. 427 



Under present conditions of means of transportation and in the absence of a 

 local market, neither cordwood nor logs can be sold with the expectation of leav- 

 ing a margin, unless cheap means of transportation, i. e., direct railroad transporta- 

 tion, can be had. 



It had been expected, and the tract was located with that expectation, that the 

 extension of the New York and Ottawa Railroad from Tupper Lake would furnish 

 that opening; but, as intimated before, the courts have denied the right of way for a 

 portion of the road, without which it cannot be built, under the constitutional clause 

 forbidding the taking of State lands for such purposes. The necessity, therefore, 

 arises of constructing independently the needed railway tracks to connect with 

 through lines, in order to market the hardwoods. Even then, while logs and the 

 better classes of firewood may be disposed of with a slight margin of profit, the bulk 

 of the latter would remain unsalable and its disposal, the burning of the debris after 

 logging, would entail a disproportionate expense. 



The solution of the market question, then, appears in the establishment of manu- 

 factures upon the tract, which would utilize all the wood and ship the manufac- 

 tured article. The most economical use of fuelwood consists in the distillation of 

 the same for acetic acid and wood alcohol. The most economical use of hardwood 

 logs is in the manufacture of staves with modern machinery, when staves are made 

 by veneer cutting, and logs down to an eight-inch diameter can be used almost to 

 the core, making no waste beyond what is needed under the boilers. A combina- 

 tion of these two kinds of manufactures would insure the most economical disposal 

 of the hardwoods. It has, therefore, been the aim of the management to secure 

 the establishment of such manufactures on the tract. 



To induce manufacturers to invest their capital in the location^of plants requires 

 not only the inducement of cheap material and low freight rates, but the assurance 

 of a constant and continuous supply of raw material for a given time, which, in the 

 case of bulky and heavy hardwood material, must be within short reach. To run a 

 modern establishment profitably, its size must be large and hence the supplies 

 required are large. 



The first question a manufacturer will ask is, Can you supply my mill regularly 

 for a sufficient number of years that will reimburse me for my plant? 



It was soon found that the quantity of material that could be offered, if the cut 

 were distributed over the entire thirty years, was not suffic'ent to attract such manu- 

 facturers. In other words, the tract was not large enough or not timbered well 

 enough to supply a well-equipped plant for thirty years with both, retort wood and 

 logs. Hence it may become necessary, in order to secure such market, to shorten 

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