MARION COUNTY. 107 



tion, may be used for charcoal purposes is about fifteen years. In Eastern 

 Texas, where the climatic conditions are in every respect suitable for the 

 rapid growth of young timber, this estimate may be considered as satisfac- 

 tory; but in addition to this period some estimate must be made for the first 

 growth of sassafras, persimmon, and other material which invariably pre- 

 sents itself during the first two or three years after the clearing af the tim- 

 ber or the ceasing of the cultivation of the soil. Taking the duration of 

 these growths at three years, this would place the period required to elapse 

 before the other timber would be suitable at eighteen, or say twenty, years. 

 A fifty ton charcoal furnace, working three hundred days annually, and 

 using one hundred bushels of charcoal for the production of each ton of 

 metal, would require a supply of five thousand bushels daily, or one million 

 five hundred thousand bushels annually. This measurement only represents 

 the quantity actually going into the furnace. There would in all cases where 

 the coal was produced in the old fashioned way of meiler pit burning be 

 more or less loss in the handling of the material. If ten per cent of the 

 total coal used be allowed for loss, then the total required would be : 



Charcoal used in furnace 1,500,000 bushels. 



Loss in handling 150,000 bushels. 



1,650,000 



This at forty bushels per cord, and estimating forty cords to the acre, 

 would require the production of about one and one-half square miles of tim- 

 ber land annually to supply the demand. To keep up this supply to its nor- 

 mal standard until the second growth would be available would require an 

 area of thirty-one square miles. 



The second growth of this part of Eastern Texas is usually old field pine, 

 a tree of remarkably rapid growth, and the present rate of its annual in 

 crease will more than counterbalance the denudation of the timbered lands 

 of their present forests. 



The supply of timber suitable for charcoal purposes may probably be esti- 

 mated at about from seven and one-half to eight million cords In the Re- 

 port of the Commissioner of Agriculture for 1888 the area under timber in 

 Marion County is given as 195,721 acres, and the estimate given is based on 

 an average of forty cords per acre. This would give a net product of 

 7,828,840 cords. The classes of timber found in the county are chiefly short 

 leaf pine and the several varieties of oak — white, red, post, pin, black jack 

 and blue jack, black and sweet gums, and some cedar and cypress along the 

 bayous of that name and in the bottom lands lying around the Caddo Lake. 



The supply of charcoal derived from this quantity of timber depends 

 largely upon the mode in which the coal is made. The coal can be made in 

 several distinct ways, of which the following three are the most practical and 



