SCAKCITY OF TIMBER IN THE SAND-HILL KE(JI()N8. 



45 



which has now on it no growtli at all, or none of greater worth than 

 the two oaks just referred to as growing on these lands. 



SCARCITY OF TIMBER IN THE SAND-HILL REGIONS. 



The exhaustion of the long-leaf pine forests is not a concern of 

 the distant future alone, — something to be talked about and never 

 to be realized. There are already localities, of limited area, to be 

 sure, where there has never been a lumber mill, and with not one- 

 tenth of the land under cultivation, where there is not now suffi- 

 cient timber to properly fence the fields. The ^ district around 

 White Hall, Bladen county, is such a one, and this place is in the 

 veiy centre of the long-leaf pine belt. Here good pine for fencing 

 has become so scarce that a "stock law" or "no fence law" has 

 been secured by which all live stock is to be confined to the Cape 

 Fear river bottom, and that alone, fenced in across a bend of the 

 river. There are othe*' localities in Bladen, Sampson and Cum- 

 berland counties with about the same proportion of land under 

 cultivation that find it hard each year to secure rails necessary for 

 fence repairs, and obtaining them becomes annually more difficult 

 as the forests from which the material is procured diminish in size. 

 It is usually the case that some tree succeeds this pine as it is 

 gradually cut off or otherwise destroyed, and this tree is usually 

 the sand black-jack, and it forms over the land where the pine 

 has once been a thicket of low, scrubby trees, which in less than 

 twenty years will die and be replaced by a similar growth. 



Scattered among these scrubby oaks are frequently stunted, 

 knotty long-leaf pines, with a thin, sickly foliage of yellowish 

 green, which are permitted to stand because they are regarded as 

 useless. There are also large tracts of land on many acres of 

 which there are no pines at all, and others where the black-jack 

 even has not succeeded in getting a foothold, wire-grass and a few 

 bushes being the extent of the vegetation. 



THE LARGER TRACTS OF BARREN LAND. 



Bladen county has its largest tract of this barren land in the 

 northern part of the' county, between the Cape Fear river on the 



