CLASSIFICATION OF THE FOREST. 21 



simply a swamp growth of longleaf pine. In heavy mixed forest, lob- 

 lolly is also culled for ties, along with much white and overcup oak. 



The Galveston storm of September 9, 1900, destroyed a great amount 

 of valuable loblolly. On many thousands of acres the forest was 

 uprooted almost to the last tree. The whole forest area west of the 

 Trinity was more or less damaged, and was left with so much debris 

 as to render damage by fire a serious menace, besides making lumber- 

 ing* much more difficult. 



FUTURE OF THE FOBEST. 



While reproduction after lumbering is good in this region as a 

 whole, under the present methods logging in pure pine forest leaves 

 very little prospect of renewal with the same growth. A succession 

 of inferior forest, beginning with scrub oak, is the natural sequence. 

 Into this the loblolly appears gradual^ to find its way back; probably 

 in the course of time, if sufficient seed-bearing trees were left for it to 

 start from, it would again gain the upper hand. Some of this forest 

 has already been cleared to make way for sugar-cane fields, and it will 

 doubtless be further curtailed for cane, rice, and other crops, and 

 notably for fruit raising. 



THE LONGLEAF FORESTS OF THE FAYETTE PRAIRIE. 



The longleaf pine area in Texas includes about 5,000 square miles 

 of that fine body of Texas-Louisiana timber which is unique in its 

 isolation far to the southwest of the main longleaf belt, east of the 

 Mississippi. The Texas portion is shaped like a broad wedge thrust 

 in between the loblolly at the south and the shortleaf at the north, and 

 extends south westward to the Trinity River, where the overlapping 

 areas of loblolly and shortleaf form its western boundary. The long- 

 leaf forest nearly coincides with the Fayette Prairie formation cast of 

 the Trinit}^. The altitude here is greater than that of the loblolly belt, 

 ranging from 100 to 300 feet, and the country is rougher and better 

 drained, although the southern margin of the longleaf belt in Orange 

 and Hardin counties, where it really overlaps the Coast Plain, is low 

 and poorly drained. The typical longleaf countiy is one of sand 

 ridges, offering an open soil texture to a relatively great depth, into 

 w r hich the long taproot of the pine thrusts itself so far as to be in great 

 measure independent of surface conditions of soil and moisture. Such 

 open, sandy soil dries rapidly near the surface — a fact to which the 

 drought-enduring nature of those annual plants which have access only 

 to surface moisture bears testimony. 



The depressions between sand ridges arc either poorl} T drained flats 



