14 BULLETIN 523, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
TABLE 9.—Proportion of the ash lumber cut in the United States contributed 
by different regions in different years. 
Region. 1899 1909 1910 1912 1914 1915 
Per cent.| Per cent. | Per cent. | Per cent. | Per cent. | Per cent. 
(eNewsenelond nine a orcs eee ees: 1.5 5.0 5.5 5.2 5.5 4.5 
(2) uid dleRA antic Oe eee saa-eeectecces Sal! 8.6 7.4 9.3 10.0 8.3 
(3) Lake States (Michigan, Wisconsin, 
and Munmesota) see ese e ee eee 38.3 19.2 19.3 13.7 13.8 14.9 
(4) Chio, Indiana, Minois, West Virginia, 
Kentucky, and Tennessee.....------ 30.8 32.6] 32.8 36.9 31.0 31.4 
(5) South Atlantic and Alabama........-. 4.9 6.5 Dail, 6.9 8.6 8.2 
(6) Lower Mississippi Valley, including 
Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, 
Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi... 17.9 27.6 28.8 27.3 39.5 32.4 
(7) Kansas, Nebraska, iowa, and South ~ 
LDPE ere el seep RG CNG ANS 0 Ke Re 1 38 ~2 2 eee al: .2 
(8) Washington, Oregon, and California. . - 1.4 | Le 33) 56 a) 1 
Hi Btay ee Wa ay cle an cegg toa NS Seek apn 100.0 109.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 | 100.0 
THE SUPPLY OF ASH TIMBER. 
About two-thirds of the present supply of ash is second growth, 
chiefly in small timber tracts and wood lots attached to farms, and 
about one-third is virgin timber, chiefly in large tracts. Usually it 
forms less than 5 per cent of the stand in which it grows. Black ash 
in the Lake States and green ash in the lower Mississippi Valley 
often form from 20 to 25 per cent of the original stand, but these 
original supplies are rapidly becoming exhausted and will seldom 
be reproduced. The green ash, however, is for the most part on 
agricultural land which ultimately will be drained and used for 
farming. At the present rate of cutting the supply of virgin ash 
will be practically exhausted in the next 10 years; but this does not 
mean that the annual cut will be very greatly diminished in the next 
decade, as it is already largely dependent on second growth. Fur- 
thermore, ash is a tree which, with a little encouragement, will main- 
tain or increase the proportions it forms of second-growth stands on 
sites where it originally occurred naturally. 
Within the geographical range of the three important commer- 
cial species—white, green, and black ash—there are approximately 
400,000,000 acres of woodland; but not over 4 per cent of this area 
has even a thin natural stand of ash such as would have an average 
increase by growth of, say, 10 board feet of ash per acre annually. 
This indicates that the maximum annual growth of ash to be ex- 
pected in the United States is 160,000,000 feet, and the probability 
is that it will be considerably less. With the exhaustion of the virgin 
ash timber, therefore, it would be well, in order that the supply of 
ash may be maintained, to reduce the annual cut to something less 
than 150,000,000 feet, unless intensive forest management of the 
genus is undertaken on a considerable scale. This does not take 
into consideration, on the one hand, decrease in area of woodland 
