220 THE FORESTS OF NORTH CAROLINA. 



sand tons a year, chiefly from the mountain section. 

 Thus it will be seen, that in these indigenous foresf 

 products are found the means and materials for large 

 businesses and freights for an indefinite time ; and 

 the value of these resources, and the demand for 

 them, increases rapidly year by year, as the accessible 

 forest regions of the continent are more and more 

 rapidly suffering exhaustion. The shops of Pitts- 

 burg, with their annual consumption of 50,000,000 

 cubic feet of timber, having exhausted the forests of 

 several States, are already turning this way for their 

 future supply ; and so of Cincinnati and of Chicago, 

 as the forests of Michigan and Upper Wisconsin 

 swiftly disappear. 



"Cape Fear Section of Route. — From the upper 

 Cape Fear, above Fayetteville for 50 miles, will* 

 come large shipments of timber and naval stores, «s 

 heretofore. There are many hundreds of square 

 miles of the long-leaf pine forests in this section yet 

 to be opened to commerce. It will be seen, by refer- 

 ence to the United States Census, that this trade 

 amounts to more than three millions per annum, and 

 a large part of it is concentrated along the Cape Fear. 

 The returns for 1879 give the shipments of naval 

 stores from Fayetteville as aggregating 96,000 barrels. 



"Deep River Section. — In this section the long 

 leaf pine and oak forests meet. There are some fine 

 bodies of the latter along the river bottoms and those 

 of its tributaries, and all over the intervening ridges 

 and hills, for a dozen miles above the Gulf; and with 



