30 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
its administration there will be no waste. Those 
great piles of sawdust left by the old-time sawmill, 
as well as all other remainders, will be converted at a 
central station into electric power to run all the mills 
and factories from which the waste is produced, 
besides leaving some to help run the enormous pulp- 
mill recently erected in the Pigeon River Valley, a 
few miles west of Asheville. The use of electricity 
in running the machinery vastly reduces the danger 
from fire, as does also cleaning up the waste in the 
woods, while yet more to diminish the danger the cut- 
over forests are to be under the care of a fire guard. 
While the new conscience is thus working in priv- 
ate ways, the people as a whole have become alive 
to the importance of saving certain parts of the long 
Appalachian watershed from the possibility of denu- 
dation ; hence there has grown up so urgent a demand 
for a national forest in the East, comparable to those 
forests with which the West for various reasons is so 
amply provided, that a bill has finally passed through 
the United States Congress making the foundation 
of such a domain possible. This, the Weeks Bill, be- 
came a law March i, 191 1, and now there is in 
process of construction a great forest reservation, 
part of which is to be in the White Mountains of 
New Hampshire, part in the mountains of Mary- 
land, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North 
Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and whose 
function shall be forever to protect the cradles of the 
great rivers that are born on the slopes of these 
mountains. 
