2 BULLETIN 1061, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
through as many as 10 fires. Each fire, however, takes its toll of 
living trees and injures and retards the growth of all the others. 
Of the trees which survive, large numbers are being bled for turpen- 
tine or cut for timber at much too early an age to get the best money 
returns. Protection and forest management mean increased timber 
growth and increased profit. 
Destructive lumbering and destructive fires are every year creating 
in the southern pine region millions of acres of waste and barren 
lands. In these idle timberlands is an enormous potential wealth, 
and their productive power is not fully realized. Economically, this 
condition is an unsettling factor just as serious as the idleness of 
thousands of farms or of factories. Forest growth should be en- 
couraged on all waste or idle lands and on lands not now in de- 
mand for agricultural use and not likely to be during the next half 
century, whether on farms or large cut-over tracts. 
This bulletin deals not only with the forest conditions on the 
upper or higher portions of the coastal plain, where farming is 
relatively important, but it is also applicable to the flat woods, where 
only 10 to 15 per cent of the land is in farms and the remainder 
mostly in the ownership of large lumber companies. Little atten- 
tion will be given to old-growth timber, which is rapidly passing. 
The aim is to present the more useful information pertaining to the 
growth and value of longleaf pine, the production of timber and 
turpentine, the methods of cutting, reforestation, and protection of 
second-growth longleaf pine, and the ways of making tracts of land 
profitable which will remain idle for many years unless they are 
devoted to growing crops of turpentine and timber. 
RANGE AND IMPORTANCE 
Longleaf pine is generally well known in the localities where it 
grows and is commonly distinguished from other species with which 
it is associated. In earlier life, the erect, stout, central stem, densely 
covered with leaves ("straw"), is one of its we,ll-known character- 
istics. Later and through life it has a straight, clean shaft or trunk. 
The leaves are from 8 to 18 inches in length, pendulous, and occur in 
crowded clusters of three leaves each, forming the familiar-looking 
tufts toward the ends of the branches (PL I). The terminal buds 
are very large and almost white. The cones ("burrs") vary in 
length from 6 to 10 inches — the longest of any of the southern 
pines — and, like all the pines, require two full seasons to reach 
maturity. The bark is orange-brown, and in mature trees separates 
on the surface into large, flat, irregular-shaped plates (PL II) 
made up of thin scales. Fully grown trees reach heights of 70 to 
150 feet, and diameters of 2 to 2% feet or occasionally 3 feet. The 
trunk is notably straight, slightly tapering, and usually clear of 
limbs for one-half to two-thirds of its length. 
The natural range of longleaf pine (fig. 1) extends from south- 
eastern Virginia southward over the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain 
to Florida and westward to eastern Texas. Commercially the range 
is very much less extensive. As a result of lumbering and repeated 
fires there remains to-day probably less than one-fifth of the original 
stand of longleaf pine, estimated to have amounted originallv to 
over 400,000,000,000 board feet. 
