60 FOREST CONDITIONS IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA. 



Alleghany will always be a farming county and can utilize locally 

 most of the timber that can be grown there. The county is now under 

 the stock law, and forest fires, which formerly did so much damage, are 

 now rare. 



TIMBER INDUSTRIES. 



LUMBER. 



Practically all of the timber cut in Western North Carolina is sawed 

 or otherwise manufactured in that part of the State; little is shipped 

 out in the log. Two-fifths of all the timber cut for sale is manufactured 

 into lumber ; but the greater part of this is shipped out of the region. 



Except for agriculture, almost all of the products of which are con- 

 sumed locally, lumbering is by far the most important industry. In 

 1909 about 185,000,000 feet of lumber brought a money return of 

 nearly $3,000,000. Table 3, p. 61, shows the total output of lumber for 

 1909 by counties and species, as obtained by the United States Census 

 Bureau. 



Three different classes of sawmills are in operation: (1) large sta- 

 tionary mills, equipped generally with bandsaws, but occasionally with 

 double circular saws; (2) small portable circular sawmills, usually run 

 by steam; (3) small stationary circular sawmills run by water-power. 



BAND MILLS. 



There were only seven large stationary sawmills in operation during 

 1908 and 1909, and only four of these ran anywhere near full time. 

 There are several other mills of this class, but they have been shut 

 down for some time, owing to the recent financial depression, or to other 

 causes, while there are two or three similar mills now in process of con- 

 struction. This class of mills manufactured about- 16 per cent of the 

 total amount of lumber cut in this region during 1909, or an average 

 of about 5,000,000 feet per mill. Though this was an enormous in- 

 crease over the cut of 1908, it did not nearly come up to the full ca- 

 pacity of these mills. 



The successful operation of such large stationary mills must depend 

 on the control of a large supply of timber, either through timber rights 

 over a large area, or, more commonly in this region, by possession of 

 both land and timber. Five operators in Western North Carolina to- 

 gether own more than 170,000 acres of forest land in four different 

 counties, and their holdings contain a stand of at least 120,000,000 feet. 



The band mills have several advantages over the smaller circular 

 mills. In the first place, there is considerably less waste in manufac- 

 ture ; the kerf cut by a band saw is about one-half of that by a circular 

 saw ; large logs can be much more profitably handled because full width 



