FORESTRY MOVEMENT IK UNITED STATES. 167 



The Federal Government recognized the need of action as early as 1799 — to be sure, only with 

 reference to a certain kind of supplies, namely, for naval construction — by an act approved 

 February 25, 1799, appropriating $200,000 for the purchase of growing or other timber, or of lands 

 on which timber is growing suitable for the Itfavy, and for its preservation for future use. Small 

 purchases were made on the Georgia coast, but nothing of importance beyond this was done 

 until 1817, when, on March 1, another act was passed renewing the act of 1799, directing a 

 reservation of such public lands, having a growth of live-oak or cedar timber suitable for the 

 Navy, as might be selected by the President. 



Under this act a reservation of 19,000 acres was made on Commissioners, Cypress, and Six 

 islands, in Louisiana. Another appropriation of $10,000 was made in 1828, and some lands 

 were purchased on Santa Eosa Sound, where during a few years an attempt at cultivation — 

 clearing the ground of roots of other trees, sawing and transplanting and pruning — was made. 

 This was done under the more general act of March 3, 1827, by which the President was 

 authorized to take proper measures to preserve the live-oak timber growing on the lands of the 

 United States. Provision was furthermore made, by an act approved March 2, 1831, for the punish- 

 ment of persons cutting or destroying any live oak, red cedar, or other trees growing on any 

 lands of the United States, by a fine of not less than thrice the value of the timber cut and 

 imprisonment not exceeding twelve months. 



Under these acts some 244,000 acres of forest land were reserved in Alabama, Florida, 

 Louisiana, and Mississippi. (See Eeport on Forestry, Yol. I.) 



It will be noted that no general conception of the need of a forest policy underlay these 

 attempts at securing sufficient material for a special purpose; material of a kind which was not 

 plentiful and was then believed a continued necessity for the building of war ships. 



We can now smile at the concern expressed so early by writers in public prints with regard 

 to the threatened exhaustion of forest supplies. The extent of our forest domain was then entirely 

 unknown, and in the absence of railroad communication the location of supplies near the centers 

 of civilization was of more moment. Logging then was carried on only along the coast and the 

 Eastern river courses. Small country mills sawed to order for home consumption or sent material 

 to the mouth of the river to be carried by vessel to home and foreign markets. The mills were 

 run in the manner of the country gristmills, often in connection with them. This petty method of 

 doing business lasted until the middle of this century, as is evidenced by the census of 1840, which 

 reports 31,560 lumber mills, with a total product valued at $12,043,507, or a little over $400 per 

 mill. By 1870 a change had already become apparent, when the product per mill was $6,500, 

 which in 1890 had become $19,000, or about three times the value for 1870, with only 21,011 mills 

 reported. 



Besides the concentration of the lumber business into large establishments, which these 

 figures show, there are other interesting changes indicated in the census figures, which we may 

 briefly note here as having a bearing upon the question of the need of a forest policy and the 

 cause for its development. While in 1S90 the efficiency of the mill establishments had increased 

 to three times what it was in 1870 and nearly fifty times that of 1840, the total product had also 

 increased in the twenty years from 1870 to 1890, nearly three times. The capital employed in th6 

 lumber industry had increased four and one-third times, showing that, while capital became less 

 efficient with concentration, the unit product of labor also became less efficient, in spite of the 

 improvement in machinery. While every dollar of capital produced less result, by over 40 per 

 cent in 1S90, in the value of the product, every dollar of wages also produced less result, by over 

 12 per cent, than it did in 1870; but the cost of raw material had increased over 16 per cent. All 

 these are signs of the deterioration and exhaustion of supplies. 



It wotild be difficult to set a date or mark an event from which the change in the methods of 

 the lumber industry, which is now such a stupendous factor in forest decimation, might be reck- 

 oned. It came as gradually or as fast as the railway systems expanded and made accessible the 

 vast fields of supply in the Northwest, while the supplies of the East were being exhausted. 



1 Especially after the war the settlements of the West grew as if by magic; the railroad mile- 

 age more than doubled in the decade from 1865 to 1875, and with it the lumber industry developed 



1 See "American lumber," by B. E. Fernow ; in One Hundred Years of American Commerce: D, O. Haynes Co., 1895. 



