10 MISC. PUBLICATION 162, U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
timber and about one-fourth is growing cordwood. A considerable 
part of the remainder is reforesting by natural means, but there are 
many million acres of land suitable for producing commercially 
valuable timber that are entirely deforested and nonproductive. 
Three-fifths of our forest land, including most of the second- 
erowth and denuded areas, lies east of the Great Plains. That region, 
however, contains only about one-tenth of the remaining old-growth 
timber and slightly more than two-fifths of all wood of merchantable 
size. Nine-tenths of our remaining original growth and three-fifths 
of all the usable wood in the country are concentrated in the Rocky 
Mountain and Pacific coast regions. 
There are five principal forest regions in the United States—the 
northern, hardwood, southern, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific coast 
(fig. 6). In addition we have a small tropical-forest area. 
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Figure 6.—Principal forest regions of the country. 
NORTHERN FOREST REGION 
The northern forests of mixed conifers and hardwoods extend 
from the Atlantic coast through New England westward across New 
York and the upper Lake States region to the Great Plains, and 
southward from New York along the Appalachian Mountains to 
northern Georgia. Characteristic of the forests of this region is the 
mixture of pine, spruce, and hemlock, with the hardwood types. 
In the northern part of this region the most important commercial 
trees have been the eastern white pine, hemlock, and spruce. It was 
the white-pine forests of the Northeastern and Lake States that 
formed the backbone of the softwood-lumber industry in this country 
from colonial times almost to the beginning of the twentieth century. 
The original stands of this species, however, have almost entirely dis- 
