19 WORKING PLAN, FOREST LANDS IN ALABAMA. 
light, is generally a layer of leaf litter. Reproduction of loblolly pine 
occurs occasionally in small groups in openings among the hardwoods. 
Creek land, as compared with the Jongleaf pine land, both in area 
and in yield per acre of merchantable timber, is unimportant. 
UNWOODED LAND. 
Of the whole tract 4,212 acres, or 11.7 per cent, is cleared and is 
or has been recently under cultivation. As the map shows, this cleared 
land is scattered over the tract in patches varying in size from 2 or 3 
to 200 or 800 acres. Most of the 58 sections surveyed contain at least 
one small farm. The cleared land is largely confined to the bottom- 
lands along the creeks, where excellent corn and cotton can be grown. 
This can be described as permanent argicultural land. 
Very little, however, of the longleaf pine land which has been 
cleared should be classed as agricultural land. Even the best of it, 
when newly broken, will not produce more than one-third of a bale of 
cotton or 15 bushels of corn per acre. Under the crude methods of 
local farming such fertility as it has becomes quickly exhausted and 
it soon begins to gully badly. It has often to be abandoned, even 
before the pine stumps upon it have rotted away. 
These worn-out fields soon revert to forest. Usually within three 
or four years after cultivation has ceased the ground becomes com- 
pletely covered with seedlings of loblolly, shortleaf, and longleaf 
pine, of which the first two greatly predominate over the last. These 
seedlings develop with great rapidity, within from ten to fifteen years 
forming dense thickets of saplings and small poles. Patches of this 
old field growth are found in all stages of development around every 
farm. 
DAMAGE TO THE FOREST. 
The two agencies which have in the past done most to alter the con- 
dition of the forest are fires and grazing. As compared with these, 
other causes of damage, such as insects and windfall, are unimportant. 
FIRES. 
Surface fires have been prevalent ever since anything was known 
about the country. It used to be the custom of the Indians to burn 
the woods to facilitate hunting, and the white settlers have kept up 
the practice to improve the grazing. 
The constantly moist soils of the creek land have prevented fires 
from having any appreciable effect on this part of the forest; but on 
the longleaf pine land, where from late summer until early spring 
the ground cover, except during or immediately after rain, is in a 
constantly dry and inflammable condition, fires have occurred with 
increasing frequency, until now it is rare for any considerable area to 
