Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1922-03-09
MUST GROW
MORE TIMBER
Nations Chief Forester Holds Out a
Hope and Sounds a Warning
Once More
Says Millions of Acres of Woodland
Are 'Out of Work" and Can
Be Given Jobs
(By W. B. Greeley

\by W. ID. dItSlSyt
Chief of u. S. Forest Service
Editors Note-W. B. Greeley is the
chief of the United States Forest Ser
vice. He is making a life work of
saving to the nation the wood that is
left and to creating a new supply of
timber TO fill the demand that will
exist for untold years to come. He
has some facts and figures that are
surprising.
The lumber industry of the Unit
ed States is dropping behind the Rock
Y Mountains. This is the outstanding
fact in the 1920 canvass of American
sawmills just completed by the For
est Service. The cut of lumber in
practically every western state has
increased. In nearly every eastern
State it has declined. Washington
heads the list of lumber producing
States and manufactures a sixth of
the entire lumber of the country.
louisiana long held second place, bat
now yields it to Oregon. California
becomes the fifth in RANK, replacing
another of her southern sisters. The
American sawmill has steadily eat
en- it's way westward and now is crop
ping the last rich pastures. Over so
per cent of the timber left in the
United States lies between the Rocky
Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
From that region the country must
draw steadily increasing part of the
thirty-fve odd billion feet of lumber
which it needs every year for its
dwellings and it's industries.
Last summer / rode over a 60-mile
stub railroad in the mountains of West
Virginia on which thirty-fv sawmills,
large and small, have been dismantled
and abandoned within the last fifteen
years. It's stations are mostly sawdust
lpiles, each with it's cluster of vacant.
rotting buildings. Another stub, a
few miles distant once marketed the
product of twelve large sawmills.
Now one of them is left and it's hum
ming saws will become silent in four
or five years. The forest industries
of this region are now practically at
an end. It's mill towns are zone with
Nineveh and Tyre" Here and there
throughout once vast forests of hem
lock, spruce and oak, there is a little
group of bottomland farms or little
patch of pasture land. Nine-tenths
of it is burned and idle waste.
An Old Story
The story of these West Virginia
mountains tells the history of many
timbered regions and once thriving
Industrial districts in the United
States. It is retold in the Allegheny
forests of Pennsylvania, in the old
sawmill towns and lumber camps of
the Great Lakes, in the pineries bor-
dering the South Atlantic and the
Gulf. It is not only story of forest
wreckage, but of economic and social
retrogression. The sawmill, pursu-
ing the course dictated by its own
financial fortunes, has left enormous
areas of unemployed and unproduct-
i've land behind it, and with the pass
ing of the sawmill passed the prin-
cipal industry and source of employ
ment. Where the denuded land was
fertile and tillable and where a genu-
me demand for cultivation followed
the lumberjack, as in the Ohio Valley
the destruction of large part of the
forest was necessary to economic pro-
gress. But enormous areas, stripped
of their timber and burned of their
young growth, will never be convert
ed into farms; and other vast stretch
es of low or uncertain agricultural
value will not be cultivated for an
other generation or more. In fact,
the farm economist tell us that the
extension of plow-lands in the Unit
ed States is due for slowing up and
Gie@er VIC AiSSSoodAJ VI f1IIGTICdu
agriculture is toward the more in
tensive tillage of land now under the
pillow. And we have also learned that
2 productive woodlot is valuable, If
not necessary, part of very many of
our farms
Many Idle Lands
The real reason for the westward
trek" of the sawmill is not because
most of the virgin forests between
the Atlantic and the Great Plains have
been cut, for such cutting was neces-
sary and inevitable 1t is rather be-
cause much of our good mother earth
is out Of work. There are some 326
million acres of logged-off land which
have not been converted into farms.
Eighty-one million acres of it are
wholly idle as far as the production
of any other useful crop is concerned.
Many other million acres are growing
but small fraction of the wood they
might produce. A large part of every
old forest region is idle today. There
are twenty million unemployed forest
acres in the Lake States and another
twenty million in tho South Jllo loo.