The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1880-06-10
Raidlng American Forests.
How England Keeps Herself Supplied
With Black Walnut Lumber.
1DeS Mnines Raoister /

[Des NIoines Register.l
The lumber dealers of England are making
grand raid on Iowa and all the black walnut
States, and are fast taking from us all that we
have left of that timber. The native forests
in Ohio and Indiana were rich with this now
precious wood, and the early settlers of those
States, in clearing the land for agricultural
purposes, destroyed numberless thousands of
acres of this timber, little thinking that in
doing so they were destroying that which in
few years would have made their lands more
valuable than gold or lead mines. The havoc
of timber in Ohio and Indiana-the settlers
there spending nearly 100 years in steadily
destroying the woods with which they found
the surface covered, girdling and killing the
great forests one year and burning them the
next-is one of the queer things in American
history as it is now looked at. The magnitude
of it young people now and all the people of
the future will never realize. 1t was an enor-
nous destruction of values, the total of which
may be estimated at hundreds of millions of
dollars. But it was inevitable. For though
west of Indiana and Ohio there were the
knowE open fields and bonndless prairies max
ing up the whole new Northwest, where the
land lay ready for the plow when the settlers
first set foot ON it, there was then no iron horse
to make it, in its far away location from the
markets Of the world, available. So it was
ignored and two generations of industrious
people spent their lives and wore themselves
out in the pitilesS toll of hewing farms out of
the dense forests of Ohio and Indiana. Te
the people of the present time these seventy
five years of steady assault on the forests seem
almost like aavaptv.fiva Wor nd
havoc. For, it is estimated by good judges,
that il the States of Ohio and Indiana stood
covered with their native forests they would
be worth more in actual value than they are
as they stand to-day. The destruction has but
lately stopped. The writer here has seen in
the last twenty years this destruction going on
in Indiana-in the great woods of Jennings
and Bartholomew counties. The eighty acres
of walnut and poplar that the settler then
spent six or eight years of hard labor to des-
troy would now make him rich, and be worth
far more than his cleared farmland that was
only twenty years ago, when there was not
this one excuse, that there were no railroads
to take settlers to the open land, where the
soil was still richer and there were no forests
to fell.
But we are writing of the English raid on
Iowa. 1t is raid to take from us what of
black walnut we have left. The traveller
along the railroads of this State sees now at
nearly every important station little out
ripping up black walnut logs into great slabs
All over the West, in the black walnut belt,
these little sawmills are cutting up into GER
tain form of boards and thick slabs all the
black walnut that can be got hold Of A large
and wealthy corporationo OF Indianapolis men,
cooperating with company of English capt.
talists, are the proprietors of these mills.
They have their buyers out at every little sta
tion and in the rural districts, and wherever
the smallest patch of black walnut can be
found. Two of these little mills are now tear
ing away in the city of Des Moines another at
Mitchellville, and all that we have left of this
valuable timber in Polk county and Central
Iowa is fast passing under their saws, coming
out broad slabs, and going thence directly on
the cars on their way to England, where, in
their greater wisdom, the people have come to
know that black walnut wood is already as
valuable, because of its durability, beauty and
growing scarcity, as mahogany. 1t is gen.
eral raid all over the West, and our farmers, if
they knew the scheme, would not sell their
walnut trees as they are selling them now, at
mere tithe of what they are worth