4 Department Circular 112, U. S. Dept of Agriculture. 



capita use of lumber to one-half or one-third the present amount — 

 to the level of European countries where lumber is an imported 

 luxury — if our resources are to be developed and our industrial 

 supremacy retained. And we must ourselves grow the great bulk 

 of the wood we need, for large increases in lumber imports are not 

 possible at reasonable prices. 



THE TIMBER LEFT IS NOT IN THE RIGHT PLACE. 



The crux of timber depletion is the exhaustion, or partial exhaus- 

 tion, of the forests most available to the great bulk of our population, 

 agriculture, and manufactures. One timbered region after another 

 in the Eastern States has been cut out. Less than 5 per cent of the 

 virgin forests of New England and but 12 per cent of her original 

 stand of timber are left. New York, the leading State in lumber 

 production in 1850, now manufactures only 30 board feet per capita 

 yearly, or not more than a tenth of the requirements of her own .popu- 

 lation and industries. Pennsylvania was the leading lumber manu- 

 facturing State in 1860. She now cuts less than the amount con- 

 sumed in the Pittsburgh district alone. 



The original pine forests of the Lake States, estimated at 350 bil- 

 lion feet, are now reduced to less than 8 billion. In 1892 the saw- 

 mills in the region bordering the Great Lakes cut 9 billion board feet 

 of lumber and largely supplied the softwood markets of the Prairie 

 and Central States and eastward to New England. To-day their 

 yearly cut is a single billion. These four densely populated regions, 

 stretching from the Atlantic to the Prairies, which formerly were 

 lumber exporters and still contain enormous areas of forest land, are 

 now largely dependent upon timber grown and manufactured else- 

 where and are becoming increasingly dependent upon timber which 

 must be shipped the width of the continent. 



The bulk of the building and structural timbers used in the Eastern 

 and Central States during the last 20 years was grown in the pine 

 forests of the South. In 1909 the southern mills cut 16 billion feet 

 of pine and dominated the larger markets as completely as the north- 

 ern pine did before. The virgin pine forests of the South are esti- 

 mated to have contained 650 billion feet of timber; they now con- 

 tain 139 billion feet aside from considerable quantities of second 

 growth. The cut of southern pine is falling off and within another 

 decade promises to exceed by little, if at all, the requirements of 

 the Southern States themselves. 



The migration of the hardwood lumber industry has followed 

 much the same course, although the regional lines are less distinct. 

 The commercial cut of hardwoods in the Middle States is almost a 

 thing of the past. It has fallen off materially in the Lake States and 

 is now decreasing in the Southern Appalachians. The principal 



