Harvesting Timber Crops 11 



In addition to the more usual sales of saw timber, ties, etc., which 

 go on throughout this district, it is doubtful if the variety of 

 cial products can be equaled anywhere. In New England there 

 are sales of beech, hard maple, and yellow birch for bobbins to 

 supply the busy looms down river. Low-grade material goes into 

 the manufacture of all kinds of wooden toys — perhaps some of the 

 toys our own children are now happily destroying are made from 

 wood grown on the White Mountain Xational Forest. Then there 

 are sales of white birch for spools, wooden novelties of all kinds, 

 and shoe pegs. There is one small peg mill in Xew Hampshire, 

 where the shipping stencils read like a lesson in world geography. 



In the Appalachians there are sales of chestnut for telephone 

 poles and extract wood, chestnut oak and hemlock tanbark, dog- 

 wood for shuttle blocks, locust for posts, sassafras roots for sas- 

 safras oil, birch twigs for birch oil, rhododendron and laurel plants 

 for ornamental purposes — the roots for briar pipes. These forests 

 cater to man's necessities, his sense of beauty, and his pleasure. 



In Florida the tree is drained of its pitch for the turpentine man, 

 and the tree itself is sold to the sawmill man, the pine knots, and. 

 it is hoped soon, the stumps, to the wood distiller. 



Perhaps the greatest impetus to the products sales in this dis- 

 trict is the rapid improvement in permanent transportation sys- 

 tems. Old railroad grades, long overgrown, are being converted 

 to the use of the modern truck; roads are reaching back into the 

 mountain valleys, not only enabling the farmer to haul his crops 

 to market, but also encouraging him to employ his off seasons in 

 getting out products from the forest. Sometimes the few crossties 

 or cords of extract wood he buys from the local forest ranger con- 

 stitute his only source of cash for replenishing his supplies of sugar. 

 coffee, and clothing. 



FORESTRY PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE 



The Forest Service has been busily engaged in building up these 

 eastern and southern forests by purchase, equipping them with tire 

 tools, trails, telephone lines, and lookout towers, perfecting the or- 

 ganization of trained forces to administer and protect them, and 

 converting the attitude of the mountain farmer from one of forest 

 destruction to forest, conservation. To date it has contented itself. 

 therefore, with taking care of the sales business which has come 

 unsolicited — not reaching out after the business which is believed 

 to exist. It is certain that the timber-sale business of to-day can 

 and will be expanded during the next 10 years to several times its 

 present size. 



