50 



FORESTS, FOREST LANDS AND FOREST PRODUCTS. 



only with sand black-jack oak and very scattering, exhausted long- 

 leaf pines. This land lies in the central and southern parts of the 

 county. Good timber is getting scarce in many places. Much of 

 this sandy land in this and other counties has been highly ferti- 

 lized and is cultivated in truck farms, vineyards and fruit orchards. 



DuPLix COUNTY contains several thousand acres, in the northern 

 part, covered only with the sand black-jack oak, through which, 

 occasionally, there occurs a few scattering lon^'-leaf pines. Near 

 the railroads a great deal of this sandy land, which has been highly 

 fertilized, is used in this county for truck garcl-ening. 



Onslow and Xew Hanover counties have jointly about 25,000 

 acres of waste land, some of which is entirely denuded and some 

 covered only with the sand black-jack oak. In many parts of New 

 Hanover county, es23ecially between Wilmington and Wrightsville, 

 there is a very promising regrowth of long-leaf pine appearing, 

 though the trees are very scattering and fires destroy a great many 

 of the smaller ones every spring. The growth of timber in the 

 eastern parts of New Hanover and Onslow counties, like that in 

 the eastern part of Brunswick county, was probably ncA'er dense. 



Besides the above tracts there are in Johnston, Pender and Lenoir 

 counties a few smaller tracts which have been stripped of the long- 

 leaf pine and on which no valuable regrowth has appeared : and 

 there is immediately along the coasts of Currituck, Dare and Car- 

 teret counties a narrow strip of land vrhich in many places is entirely 

 bare, and has been described by the late Prof. W. C. Kerr as form- 

 ing drifting sand dunes, which, along the coast of Dare county, "are 

 moving under the impact of the trade winds constant!}^ toward the 

 south-west into the sound." What effect these moving dunes may 

 have on the existino- channels in the sounds or how thev mav 

 modify or change the inlets between the sounds and the ocean are 

 questions foreign to the present subject. 



It is a well-known fact, however, that the breaking of the ocean, 

 in 1763, through one of these untimbered sand banks formed the 

 Neiv Inlet, 16 miles below Wilmington, N. C. , and seriously changed 

 the channel at the mouth of the Cape Fear river, lessened the 

 depth of its water and caused the expenditure of a large amount 

 of money before the damage done could be rectified and the break 



