companies obtain their pulpwood supplies are divided 
into procurement areas or dealerships ranging in size 
from part of a county to several counties, depending 
upon the amount of timber available in the area and 
distance from the mill. Each dealer is assigned a monthly 
or weekly quota of pulpwood to be produced from his 
area. In filling this quota, he assigns quotas to a numbe: 
of independent producers. Like the yard operator in 
assisting the sawmill operator, the dealer often assists 
the producer by advancing him money and lining up 
stumpage. Thus, both the concentration yard and dealer- 
ship arrangements help to solve many of the financial 
and organization problems of small operators. 
OTHER FOREST PRODUCTS INDUSTRIES 
Fifth of Drain is Timber Cut for Fuel Wood 
Equal to pulpwood as an item of drain on the forests, 
fuel wood accounted for a fifth of the total drain in 
South Carolina in 1946. Two-thirds of the fuel-wood 
drain is cut from hardwoods, most of them of pole size. 
Fuel wood makes up only about 4 percent of the total 
board-foot drain. 
Fuel-wood drain is associated to a considerable degree 
with the tobacco-growing industry, which is concen- 
trated in the northern part of the Coastal Plain. The 
1946 tobacco acreage in South Carolina was among the 
highest since 1920, exceeded only slightly by the acreage 
in 1928 (9). Tobacco harvested in Horry County, for 
FIGURE 58.— Poles add to the 
great variety of timber prod- 
ucts cut from the forests 
of South Carolina. 
instance, jumped from 29,000 acres in 1945 to 34,000 
in 1946. Furthermore, the 1946 average yield per acre 
set a new record for the State (2). This meant a record 
tobacco crop to be cured and a large part of it was 
cured with fuel wood cut from hard hardwood pole 
timber. 
Fuel wood is produced for domestic heating and 
cooking throughout every county. In recent years less 
wood has been cut from sound pine trees and a greater 
proportion has been obtained from slabs and other mill 
waste. This has contributed to reducing the total fuel- 
wood drain in the State from 1.4 million cords in 1936 
to 1.0 million cords in 1946. 
Veneer Industry Cuts 100 Million Board Feet Annually 
The increase in number of veneer mills from 25 in 
1936 to 48 in 1946 (fig. 57) has not been accompanied 
by a comparable increase in veneer log drain. Between 
1936 and 1945, timber cut for veneer logs averaged 
about 100 million board feet a year. In 1946, however, 
veneer log drain increased to 150 million board feet, 
which may herald an upward trend. 
Two industries are dependent upon the veneer plants 
for raw material — the furniture industry and the con- 
tainer industry. High-grade face veneers and lower 
grades, cut mainly from sweetgum, black gum, and yellow- 
poplar, are used by the furniture factories in South 
Carolina and those in the highly developed furniture 

46 Forest Resource Report No. 3, U. S. Department of Agriculture 
a 
