18 LOGGING 
England States. The lumber is prized for flooring and furniture 
and is also used for woodenware and gunstocks. Large quan- 
tities of the rough wood are utilized in destructive distillation. 
The lumber cut of maple in 1920 was 875,000,000 feet. 
Red Gum. — The red gum (Liquidambar styraciflua) is largely 
a tree of the lowlands and is found in the best form and in the 
heaviest stands along the Mississippi river bottoms in Arkansas, 
Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky. 
Missouri virgin bottom lands contain about 5500 board feet 
per acre of merchantable timber and those in South Carolina 4000 
feet, but second-growth bottom land stands run as high as 
13,000 feet per acre. The maximum stands in the Mississippi 
river bottoms seldom exceed 15,000 board feet per acre. 
Red gum has become an important factor in the hardwood 
market and it is used extensively for furniture, tobacco boxes, 
fruit packages, and slack cooperage and other forms of containers. 
The lumber cut in 1920 was 850,000,000 board feet. 
Chestnut. — Chestnut {Castanea dentata) is widely distributed 
over the Central hardwood region, although 62 per cent of the 1919 
cut was manufactured in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North 
Carolina and Virginia. The wood is extensively used for furni- 
ture, interior finish, shingles, fencing, telephone poles, veneer 
backing, slack cooperage and for the production of tannin extract. 
Chestnut grows in mixed forests of oak and other hardwoods 
but the sprout forests are largely pure. The stand per acre is 
extremely variable, averaging from 2000 to 6000 board feet. 
During the year 1920 475,000,000 feet of lumber was manu- 
factured from this species. 
Beech. — Beech {Fagus americana) is found chiefly in the 
northern and Appalachian forests associated with maple and 
birch. The centers of lumber production are in Indiana, Mich- 
igan, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Kentucky. 
The chief uses of beech are for tool handles, clothes pins, 
flooring, slack cooperage, veneers and woodenware. Large 
quantities of rough wood are used for the production of wood 
alcohol and other products of distillation. 
The lumber cut in 1920 was 325,000,000 feet. 
Birch. — The commercial distribution of birch is largely con- 
fined to the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, New York; Vermont 
and Maine where it is associated chiefly with maple and beech, in 
