PROFITS FROM FARM WOODS 5 
to turn to our timber to make a living and keep our farm from passing into 
the hands of the bankers. 
Timber turned the trick for Robert White and for his brother 
and sister. Their farm contained about a thousand acres of thrifty 
shortleaf pine and hardwood timber. Except for occasional small 
railroad fires, the timber had grown under protection. A windstorm 
in 1919 mowed down 68 lar ge pines and a small sawmill was brought 
in to utilize them. This, the first logging, was followed each year 
until the big drought in 1924-25 by small sawmill contracts, cutting 
only selected ripe pines, oaks, and poplars. The White woods became 
widely known as an example of good forest management. (Fig. 2.) 
They were cited in the State legislature in the campaign of 1925 
and 1926 for a State forestry or eanization. 
The hard years of 1924-25 proved an acid test of the belief and 
prophecy of the father, John F. White, of White Hall, that timber 
F-24086 
FIGURE 3.—During the winter season all the tenants work in the woods or at the 
woodpile and thus support themselves and their families 
growing would prove to be a good investment. Since that time 
Robert White and his sister have been able to keep their farms by 
means of the income from the timber. The woods have yielded from 
$5,000 to $8,000 yearly. The timber has been sold for “so much a 
thousand feet ” of lumber measured in the stack. But there is much 
more to the story, for all the tenants on the farm have had winter 
work, cutting crippled and diseased trees and tops of the logged 
trees into stove wood. This has kept them out of debt and been 
the means of a fair living for their familes numbering about 60 
people. (Fig. 3.) 
The men who cut the trees are paid by the cord for delivering 
the wood at a central yard at the farmstead. The other men, in- 
cluding the sawyers and splitters, are paid by the day. This ‘fur- 
