66 FORESTS, FOREST LANDS AND FOREST PRODUCTS. 



The forests of all the Northern kStates have been cut over and 

 the most valuable timber removed. Maine, Vermont, western 

 Penns3dvania and West Virginia still manufacture, however, large 

 quantities of hardwoods, but the supply of them is so rapidly being 

 reduced that in a few years the annual output will be reduced to 

 the growth in the forests during a year. 



The condition of the timbered lands is about the same in all the 

 Southern States. The pine in the lower districts has in places been 

 entirely removed, but in other places there is still much left, w^hile 

 the hardwood on the uplands has for a century been called upon 

 to supply local needs and in most places has had the finest timber 

 culled, except toward the mountains of the south-eastern States 

 where there are magnificent virgin forests of hardwoods. These 

 forests of the South are the ones to which the lumbermen of the 

 North are looking as the supply of timber near the seats of con- 

 sumption becomes exhausted, and once that the tide of millmen 

 turns this way the depletion of the forests of this State and those 

 farther south will he a matter of only a few years. 



Bulletin No. 5 of the Eleventh U. S. Census gives the amount 

 of yellow pine and cypress land owned in nine Southern States 

 by establishments located only in Michigan and Wisconsin to be 

 1,407,358 acres, estimated to have standing on them a total prod- 

 uct of eleven billion feet, board measure, of merchantable timber, 

 valued at |8, 723,000. The timber on this land is cypress and 

 hard pines — i. e., long-leaf, loblolly, and short-leaf pines, and this 

 large amount invested shows that Michigan millmen, already 

 foreseeing the exhaustion of the northern forests, are investing ill 

 those timbers which are suitable to take the place of the white pine. 

 Even at the present rate of removal, and allowing that there is no 

 decrease in the business from the free entrance into the United 

 States of Canadian lumber, the standing pine in the eastern part 

 of North Carolina cannot last twent}^ years, and may not last more 

 than fifteen years, unless a wise policy obtains. The indications 

 are, however, that there will be in the next five years a much 

 greater expansion of the milling industry in eastern North Caro- 

 lina than has taken place during the past five 3^ears and a pro- 



