Timber Use in Indiana 



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SEVERAL TIMES as much timber is consumed 

 in Indiana as is produced from local forests. For 

 construction of homes and other buildings, the 

 chief demand is for softwoods which are not produced 

 in quantity in the State. Probably less than half of 

 the lumber used is cut within the State. In 1948, 

 manufacturing industries used 450 million board-feet 

 of wood as lumber, veneer, and bolts, but only about 

 250 million feet of this was native hardwoods. In 

 fact, most users of wood products secure at least part 

 of their wood needs from out-of-State sources. 



The Lumber Industry 



Indiana was once a leading producer of high-quality 

 hardwood lumber and allied products. About the 

 turn of the century, sawmills in the State cut more 

 than a billion board-feet of lumber annually (fig. 26). 



However, many of the high-quality hardwood logs 

 were a byproduct of land clearing. As more and 

 more of the land passed from forest to farms, the high 

 production of quality hardwoods could not be 

 maintained. 



There are about 1,100 sawmills in the State — about 

 one mill for every 4,000 acres of forest land or one mill 

 for every 2,000 acres of sawtimber. 



In Indiana, as elsewhere in the Central States, much 

 of the luinber is produced by small, portable, circular 

 mills (fig. 27). There were only 30 sawmills that cut 

 1 million board-feet or more in 1947 (fig. 28), yet 

 these few luills sawed 29 percent of all the lumber. 

 Nine of these fairly large mills are in northern Indiana 

 and 21 in the southern part of the State. 



Production of native-gro\vn lumber in 1949 was 

 estimated to be 183 million board-feet. About two- 

 thirds of this lumber was produced in southern 



Figure 26. — Lumber production in Indiana has leveled off at about 200 million board-feet annually. (Source: Lumber Production in the Unitea ' 

 States, 1799-1946, U. S. Dept. Agr. Misc. Pub. 669. 1948. Forest Service estimates shown beyond the year 1946.) 



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Forest Resource Report No. 10, U. S. Department of Agriculture 1. 



