The Timber Resource 



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Foresl Land 



AFTER MORE than 150 years of settlement and 

 /~\ development, Tennessee is still almost half for- 

 ested. Some 12.6 million acres out of a total 

 26.9 million are forest land. 5 Virtually all the forest 

 is capable of producing merchantable timber. About 

 2 percent, chiefly within the Great Smoky Mountains 

 National Park in east Tennessee, is reserved from 

 timber cutting. Of the commercial forest acreage, 6 

 91 percent is privately owned. The largest part of 

 the public commercial timberland is in national 

 forest. Next come State forests and then TVA lands. 



The proportion of land in forest varies considerably 

 from one region of the State to the other (fig. 12). 

 The Plateau region, where seven acres out of every 

 ten are in forest, is the most heavily timbered. West 

 Tennessee, with its deep, fertile soils, is largely agri- 

 cultural; here only 30 percent of the region is in 

 forest. In other sections of the State, the proportion 

 of land in forest ranges between these two extremes. 

 Forest land area, 1948-50, was as follows: 



5 Detailed statistics on 1948-50 acreage — as well as on timber 

 volume, growth, and cut — are in the appendix. 



6 The technical and uncommon terms used in this report, as 

 well as certain common terms given special meaning, are defined 

 on pages 41, 43. 



Survey region: 



West 



West-Central 



Central 



Plateau 



East 



State 12,607.6 



Thousand 

 acres 



Percent of 



total land 



area 



1, 794. 2 



30 



2,111.4 



62 



2, 345. 1 



37 



3, 056. 7 



69 



3, 300. 2 



49 



47 



Total forest acreage in Tennessee is not likely to 

 decrease from its present 12.6 million. It may increase 

 somewhat as the expansion of industry continues. 

 Poorer croplands will doubtless revert to forest when 

 subsistence farmers turn to employment in the ex- 

 panding industrial centers. 



Forest Types 



From the Mississippi bottoms in the west to the 

 mountains in the east, hardwoods are the principal 

 forest trees. More than a dozen species of red and 

 white oaks in mixture with other hardwoods are 

 dominant on three-fourths of the forest area. The 

 generalized distribution of the major forest types is 

 shown on the map following page 56; within these 

 outlines many small areas of other types are inter- 

 mingled. 



14 



Figure 12. — Proportion of commercial forest land by county, 1948-50. 



Forest Resource Report No. 9, U. S. Department of Agriculture 



