404 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
mills in April and May—sometimes as late as June ; and the 
sawing commences on the arrival of the “head of the drive.” 
A mill which saws during the season five million feet of lum¬ 
ber, keeps three vessels carrying it to market. So that the 
Green Bay trade, in a prosperous season, has in constant ser¬ 
vice about a hundred vessels, averaging nine or ten men each. 
There are thus occupied in this trade nearly three thousand 
men, who, with their families, make up a population of, say, 
ten thousand—all of whom, with hundreds of teams, have to be 
fed from the prairie regions southward. These are significant 
facts, as affecting the agricultural interests of the State ; and 
yet it will surprise many readers to learn that scarcely a barrel 
of pork or flour, or a bushel of oats, consumed by all this 
force, comes from Wisconsin. Chicago is the great market for 
Green Bay lumber ; and Illinois produce is returned in pay 
for it—while the harvests of Wisconsin farmers are sent East, 
to be sold for less prices than they would get here. 
The extension of a railroad northward, into the Green Bay 
pineries—for instance, the Chicago and North-Western—afford¬ 
ing lumbermen a reliable communication, at all seasons of the 
year, with the fertile farming regions of Southern Wisconsin, 
would at once produce a revolution in all this great trade ; and 
Wisconsin would then reap the benefit of Wisconsin enterprise 
and labor. Our own farmers would find the pineries, and our 
lumbermen would find the farms, moved so near together as to 
be within hail of each other ; and instead of the exhausting 
effect of the present state of things, our State would grow and 
prosper from her own industry. 
Another thing : there is comparatively very little farming 
done in the lumber region. The country is rugged ; there are 
few roads ; and to a man in search of a farm it looks like the 
work of a lifetime to acquire a foothold there. There are fair¬ 
er fields ; there is a softer climate ; there are roads and school- 
houses, and more social advancement, further southward. So 
he turns away ; and so we go on, year after year, hewing down 
our wealth of timber and carrying it off to keep up the pros- 
