360 MISC. PUBLICATION 218, U. 8. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
contains two other items on forest taxation. One quoted Arthur Hill, 
of Saginaw, a lumberman, who favored an amendment to the tax 
laws to provide for a “‘flat rate per acre for a long term of years” 
(203, Rept. 1905-6, p. 153). The other quoted the secretary of the 
Indiana State Board of Forestry on the activities in that State in 
preparing a tax-rebate bill to take the place of the earlier (1899) 
Indiana law, which meanwhile had been considered to be unconsti- 
tutional (203, Rept. 1905-6, p. 154). 
The Michigan Forestry Commission report of 1907-8 (203) carries 
the account of the Great Lakes Forestry Conference and of the meeting 
of the Michigan Forestry Association, at both of which meetings forest 
taxation was extensively discussed. At the first-mentioned meeting 
such nationally prominent men as Filibert Roth, B. E. Fernow, then 
of Ontario, Pres. Charles R. Van Hise, and Dean H. L. Russell, of 
the University of Wisconsin, and A. C. Shaw, of the Federal Forest 
Service took part, along with members of the Michigan Constitutional 
Convention’s Committee on Public Lands and Reforestation and the 
legislative Forestry Commission of Inquiry. At the second of these 
meetings, besides Prof. Roth and Dr. Fernow, several local timber- 
land owners spoke on the subject of forest taxation. One of these, 
Charles W. Ward, submitted a plan (203, Rept. 1907-8, p. 81), which 
seemingly embodied Mr. Hubbell’s proposed change in the method of 
taxation but limited its scope of application.” Instead of Hubbell’s 
broad objective classification, embracing all forests as such, it intro- 
duced a subjective classification based on a specific mental attitude 
of each individual owner toward his forest, namely, whether or not 
he would elect to place it under State forestry supervision. Oddly 
enough this subjective classification in the end prevailed, not only 
in Michigan but elsewhere. 
A parallel campaign, having the same yield-tax objective as in 
Michigan but sponsored initially by a group of Federal and State 
forest officials—technical foresters and, for the most part, members of 
the Society of American Foresters—was inaugurated around the turn 
of the century. The two branches of the movement seem however 
to have been quite independent of each other, except that on occa- 
sions several of the more active men in the technical group, like Dr. 
Fernow, A. C. Shaw, and Alfred Gaskill of the Federal Bureau of 
Forestry, and E. M. Griffith, State forester of Wisconsin, were invited 
to address some of the Michigan meetings. Aside from Michigan the 
efforts of this group focused most directly on the State activities in 
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as will be brought out subsequently. 
The discussions by this group further served to bring the question 
before the public in a general way and undoubtedly were influential 
in*leading to the decision of the National Conservation Commission 
to have a thoroughgoing study made. This was undertaken by the 
United States Forest Service through the employment of Fred R. 
Fairchild, of Yale University, the results appearing as a part of the 
Commission’s report (101). 
12 A fuller report of Ward’s proposal was printed in the American Lumberman (2/4). Subsequently, an 
article by Ward in the same journal (215) indicates that the plan he proposed in 1907 arose from his own 
independent thinking on the subject over a period of years and was not an adaptation of Hubbell’s proposal. 
In this 1911 article he said: ‘‘There has been in my mind for many years, even as far back as 1882, a fair 
method of assessing timber holdings.’’ This consisted for mature forests of (1) an assessment under the 
property tax of the soil value as unimproved agricultural land and (2) a levy of a specific tax on each 1,000 
board feet of lumber, or its equivalent in other products, upon the standing timber being cut and manu- 
factured; and for all newly planted land exemption from all ad valorem taxes and, in lieu of such, a specific 
tax of 5 or 10 cents an acre each year until the planted trees could be brought to maturity when the exemp- 
tion and annual specific tax would cease and the property be taxed as proposed for matured forests. 
