6 BULLETIN 299, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
For planing-mill products, furniture, and car construction old- 
growth ash is usually preferred because a high degree of strength and 
stiffness is not required or because large sizes or widths are necessary. 
Black ash (called brown ash commercially) makes especially hand- 
some interior finish. 
Second-growth ash of good quality will usually bring the best price 
as handle, boat-oar, vehicle, or agricultural-implement stock rather 
than as lumber. This excludes ash grown in swamps, which is too 
fine-grained and soft. 
Old-growth ash of fair size and quality brings the best price if cut 
into lumber and graded, the upper grades being sold for car construc- 
tion, vehicle and automobile bodies and panels, and planing-mill 
products, the lower grades for furniture, refrigerators, and possibly 
the cull stuff for butter-tub heading. In exceptional cases high- 
grade old-growth ash timber can best be sold for boat oars. 
Ash timber of poor quality for lumber can probably best be sold for 
stave and heading bolts for butter tubs or used for firewood or char- 
coal. It is also used in some parts of the country for fence posts and 
bars where more suitable kinds of trees are lacking. 
Ash timber of old or second growth, suitably located, can often be 
sold most advantageously for export logs. Five to seven million feet 
of green ash logs are exported annually in addition to the several 
million feet of ash exported in the form of deals and planks. 
GROUPS AND SPECIES OF AMERICAN ASH. 
The ashes in the United States may be divided into five groups, 
containing in all 18 or more species, distinguished from each other 
as shown in the key (Table 3 ) . 
Table 3. — Key to American ashes. 
Genus FRAXINUS. — Trees and shrubs with opposite, p innately compound 
leaves, and fruit a dry samara. Divisible into five groups: white, green, water, 
black, and shrub groups, distinguished on the basis of flowers and fruit. 
I. Flowers without petals, dioecious, polygamous, or perfect. 
A. Body of fruit terete or nearly so. Wings not extending to base of seed. 
Bark fissured. Flowers dioecious. 
1, White Ash Group. Wings of samara terminal or nearly so. 
a. Twigs glabrous. 
(1) F. americana — seed with wing, 1 to 2 inches long. 
(2) F. texensis — seed with wing, less than inch long. 
Hardly more than a form of F. americana. 
b. Twigs and lower surface of leaflets pubescent. 
(3) F. biltmoreana. 
