USA > Pennsylvania > Pennsylvania, colonial and federal : a history, 1608-1903, Volume Three > Part 34
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chanical and civil engineering, chemistry, zoology, mathematics, English and rhetoric, geology, ethics, German language, physical science, etc.
The experimental farm has a barn 54 by 100 feet, with a wing especially adapted to experimental purposes, a horse barn, a calf barn and a 100-ton silo. There is also an example of the modern creamery, with all of the best types of machinery for the manu- facture of butter and cheese. The number of persons who di- rectly or indirectly receive instruction every year from this insti- tution approaches 1,000, while the spreading gratuitously of its numerous educative bulletins, the many valuable papers supplied in the annual reports, and various other methods of imparting instruction, give the college a commanding position among the educational institutions of the State.
FORESTS AND FORESTRY
The density of the forests on the Atlantic seaboard when the earliest settlers arrived was in one sense a misfortune. Before an acre of ground could be sowed with grain an acre must be cleared of trees. There was more timber than could possibly be used. This led to extravagance and waste of the forest re- sources. Had the forests been located west of the Alleghanies (and the coast treeless), with the country otherwise as inviting, no doubt the first thing these same settlers would have done, after establishing themselves, would have been to provide for a future supply of timber.
Except in a few small areas Pennsylvania was originally cov- ered by forests. East of the central mountain ranges where the oak, hickory, elm, ash, tulip-poplar, chestnut, walnut and butternut predominate, the average timber production per acre was probably from 3,000 to 5,000 feet, board measure.
In the mountain ranges in the central part of the State, white pine and hemlock were much more important than the hard wood
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or broad-leaved trees. There were many acres which produced as high as 50,000 feet of good lumber. In the same region, often intermixed with the pine and hemlock, beech, birch and sugar maple were quite common, though as a rule they seldom produced more than 3,000 feet of lumber to the acre. West of the Allegheny river the oaks were the predominant trees. Tak- ing the entire area of the State the sugar maple was formerly probably the tree which was most common and most widely found.
At the present time there is between one-sixth and one-fourth of the State which is producing almost nothing, and which would in the long run yield its largest revenue and greatest public bene- fit if it were devoted to production of forests.
No other nation has ever equalled America in the removal of forests. The thoroughness and celerity with which this work has been accomplished is a surprise to lumbermen from abroad. "Forestry has been well said to begin with the axe." It should be added : it does not end there. The lumberman destroys his own vocation; the forester perpetuates it.
Important as our forests have been for the lumber which they have furnished, and the employment which they have given to our people, it is more than doubtful whether or not the injury to the country which is likely to follow from the vast denuded areas left by the lumberman, and by the fire which follows him, will not lead to a public injury greater than the good already de- rived. This problem may be briefly stated thus : Living for- ests are more important to our country than dead lumber. This statement is so true and yet so likely to be regarded as extreme that it should be explained by saying that forests
(a) Furnish lumber and nourish the arts; but even if re- moved it would be possible to import sufficient wood for our needs, as England is practically doing . now.
(b) Forests conserve rainfall and prolong the period of use- fulness of the water which the earth receives from the sky.
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(c) It is almost certain that they moderate climatic ex- tremes, because of the watery vapor which they are constantly returning to the air. This prevents (at least to a certain extent ) the escape at night by radiation of the earth's heat and so pre- vents premature frost.
(d) Forests furnish nesting places for birds, upon the preservation and multiplication of which agriculture depends to destroy the increasing plague of insects.
(e) Of all the agencies for the removal of carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere, and for the restoration of oxygen to it, there is nothing so effective as plant life.
(f) As sanatoriums, it is coming to be recognized that the forests are of the greatest value to those who are weakened by the exacting duties of our modern life. Pulmonary tubercu- losis will, in the near future, be almost entirely treated by open- air life in or near extensive bodies of woodland.
For practical purposes we may say that in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, forestry may be considered under two heads.
I. State forestry, under direction of the State government, where immediate financial returns are not of necessity demanded.
II. Individual or corporate forestry, in which immediate returns, of financial or other character, are desirable and ex- pected.
State Forestry. The first duty of government is to per- petuate itself by establishing and maintaining conditions which promise to lead most surely to an enduring prosperity of the peo- ple. To this end every available acre should be made product- ive. Ground that cannot be farmed by the citizen, but from which the State can in time gain a lucrative timber crop, should be devoted to forestry. In nothing is a settled, intelligent plan more requisite than in this work. The mistake of a single ad- ministration might ruin a plan for a century which otherwise would have been an entire success. As in our public school sys- tem only trained instructors can be legally employed, so it
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should be in the forestry work of the State; merit should be the only reason for placing a man on the forestry force, and sure promotion should reward the most efficient public servants en- tirely irrespective of what their political preferences may be.
No plan yet suggested promises more surely to prevent State forestry from becoming an adjunct of a political system than to establish a school of practical forestry on one of our State reservations, where, along with thorough instruction in the necessary branches, the pupils shall acquire a working knowledge of their profession and an ability to direct the operations by themselves laboring in the forest under competent supervision. This would make their services so immeasurably superior to those of untrained men that there could be no thought of em- ploying inferior help. It would also open a promising avenue to our young men who are now considering forestry as a life work.
Pennsylvania in the near future will be in actual possession of half a million acres of land suitable to the growth of timber trees. To properly manage this vast area, which will probably be doubled in five years more, will require at least five hundred trained men. Of these at least one hundred should be accom- plished foresters. This seems like a large force to be provided for out of the public treasury. It must, however, be remem- bered that such a force will be expected to place the Common- wealth in the way of a return of several millions of dollars annu- ally. The experience of Germany, and England in India, proves that the best service pays by producing a proportionately larger financial return. It is worth while to remember that "Prussia from 6,000,000 acres of State forests derives a net annual reve- nue of $1.50 per acre. The aggregate of the state forests in Germany is 10,000,000 acres, from which is derived an annual average net profit of $25,000,000; the forests of Germany sup- port 3,000,000 people."
To mature a crop of timber will require from thirty to one hundred years. Locust may become available for railroad ties
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in about thirty years. White pine can hardly be expected to yield any considerable revenue inside of seventy-five years. The oaks will probably require a longer period. It is not to be expected, however, that during all this time there will be no return. The increasing scarcity of timber convinces one that in from ten to fifteen years the forest should be made self-supporting by sale of smaller timber, which necessarily must be thinned out to allow a better growth of the more desirable remaining trees.
There always has been a class of men who can see no wisdom in entering upon a policy which requires so long a time for finan- cial returns. To all such the sufficient answer should be that the most competent statesmen recognize the fact that our safety as a nation demands restoration of extensive bodies of timber on ground which will produce no other crop profitably, and the sooner we begin the sooner will the demand be satisfied. The longer we delay it the greater will be the difficulties, the greater the damage done, and the more costly the unavoidable task. President Roosevelt clearly realized this when he declared that forestry and irrigation were the two most important internal ques- tions now before the country.
In the acquisition of land for its reservations, by purchase, the State is simply restoring it to the legal status it had before it was patented by the individual; that is, the Commonwealth pays no taxes on the land which it owns. By some uninformed people this is thought to be a hardship to the county, because it is forgotten that, first : This land, with the timber on it, was sold for less money (26 2-3 cents per acre) than the State is now pay- ing to gain possession of it after the timber has been removed ; second, that the individual and the county have already reaped the benefit of the timber crop removed; third, that much of this land has become so poor that the owner refuses to pay the taxes upon it, and the land has practically reverted in this condition to the county ; fourth, that this land is now valuable solely because the State has appeared in the market as a purchaser ; fifth, the
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county can not, or will not, protect this ground from fires and from thieves, which together would forever prevent it from be- coming a source of revenue; sixth, that it is necessary for the prosperity of the county itself that this ground should be made productive again and that the whole cost of this falls upon the Commonwealth ; seventh, that the State pays annually twenty-five dollars a mile upon the roads which run through the reservation, and so places the highways in better condition than they were under county administration. (It must also be remembered that there are but few schools for the county to support in regions where the State is acquiring its reservations ) ; eighth, that taxes are paid for protection, and as the county has in the past practically failed to protect timber land, it merits no compensation where it fails to render protection.
It is fairly an open question whether our whole method of obtaining revenue from timber land should not be changed. It is safe to say that thousands of acres of land are being denuded of trees annually in this State because the owner can not afford to pay taxes upon land which yields no revenue and is in constant danger of having its trees destroyed by fire. If standing tim- ber "earns its right to stand by the benefit which it confers upon the public," any system of taxation which encourages the owner to remove the timber is an injury to the public. It would be wiser to remove this tax from standing timber, but to tax it when the owner utilizes it, because he has thus deprived the pub- lic of what is important for its welfare and derived for him- self an income by doing so.
The work of forest restoration on State lands has actually commenced. Within five years millions of young trees will be planted on our reservations annually. The State is also ren- dering a no less important service in the protection which public and private lands are receiving against incendiaries and timber thieves. Within eighteen months a distinguished judge as- serted that the owner of unseated land had practically no protec-
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tion against such lawless persons. The appearance of the State as a prosecutor in such cases has wholly changed this. Convic- tions are now of common occurrence, even within the judicial district where the remark was recently made.
Education has always been regarded as a legitimate field for State activity. Forestry has not yet ceased to have an educa- tional aspect. It would seem to be an entirely proper thing if from the State nurseries there could be a free annual distribu-
COPENN.
Bristol from the Island
From Day's Historical Collections tion of young forest trees to our citizens. The cost would be small, the good gained incalculable, and the lessons imparted would be lasting.
II. Individual or corporate forestry differs with State forestry in that it anticipates returns within a reasonable period. For example, a railroad company which is obliged an- nually to purchase large number of railroad ties, and discovers that these are constantly becoming more difficult and more costly to obtain, might well undertake to grow them itself because it would be the shortest visible manner of obtaining what was es- sential to them, and because it would educate other land holders to produce ties on land which would yield no other crop.
It is fortunate indeed that there are several species of trees which are native to, or will thrive in, Pennsylvania and which are of such rapid growth that the individual who plants them may
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himself receive a revenue from them. There is, for example, a constantly increasing demand for pulpwood. Tulip poplar, or yellow poplar (Liriodendron), grows naturally and rapidly in our mountain valleys, and the Carolina poplar increases in size with even greater certainty and rapidity on almost any soil which has some fertility and moisture. Both of these trees fur- nish good pulp material.
The tanning industry, of all others, appears to be the one which will most surely and speedily look to forestry for a per- petuation of its supplies. It has been our custom in this State to depend mainly upon good-sized oak or hemlock trees for tan- ning bark. The fact is that a larger percentage of tannin may be obtained from young oak trees than from the old. In Ger- many the most of the bark used comes from trees which are be- tween fifteen and forty years old. If we protect a black oak or rock oak stump from which the tree has recently been removed, the sprouts will in the course of a few years become valuable for tanning purposes. The chestnut tree, which is a quick grower, would, under proper care in about twenty years from the seed or the stump, furnish an additional resource upon which the tim- ber grower could count. Chestnut wood yields its tannin read- ily to proper treatment. Probably the growth of willows for bas- ket making will before long become a source of revenue.
There is another aspect from which individual or corporate forestry in Pennsylvania should be considered. In the nature of the case, State forestry here will probably be limited to such parts of the Commonwealth as are hilly, rocky or infertile, for the reason that only land of this character is likely to become part of our forestry reservation system. It is surely not wise for the State to compete with its citizens in any business which they can be induced to undertake for themselves. Competition of this sort might prove disastrous to private enterprise. But as the effects of forestry upon water flow, climate and atmos- pheric purity are equally important in all portions of the Com-
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monwealth, inducements should and probably will eventually be offered sufficiently great to enable land owners to undertake the work of forest restoration in regions where the State is not do- ing so.
Individual forestry as a rule would naturally be done upon a better soil than that owned by the State. The result would be a better yield, in a shorter time, than that on the State reserva- tions. This would naturally be in the interest of the individual. It is to be remembered that the private land owner, however, can hardly sacrifice land which is capable of yielding a larger or a quicker return if devoted to production of grain or to grazing, important as this may be to the community, unless the commu- nity in some way compensates him for growing forests. There appears to be no more direct and equitable method of compensa- tion than by reduction or rebate of taxes.
In fact this is in Pennsylvania already an accepted principle. and laws are now in force which allow such reduction. It is strange, however, that so little advantage is taken of them by those most directly interested.
It may be confidently asserted that the production of timber in this country will never be in excess of the demand. To show how great a quantity of wood we are using here annually I quote the following, at second hand, from the "Forester" for May, 1902, p. 216: "In 1899, the pulp industry of the United States consumed daily 6,648 cords of wood, which would approximate an annual consumption of 955,400,000 feet, board measure ; this was but one-half of one per cent. of the total wood used for other purposes." In other words, the quantity of wood used for other purposes than pulp annually in the United States reaches the enormous figure of 191,080,000,000 feet, board measure.
Already some very important forestry work has been done by individuals and by corporations. Those who are charged with the administration of the Girard estate have for several years been engaged in forest restoration in Schuylkill and Centre
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counties. General Paul Oliver and Mr. Albert Lewis are now suc- cessfully illustrating restorative forestry methods on their grounds in Luzerne county.
One phase of forestry which is common enough abroad, in Germany, but has been little considered here, merits a brief con- sideration. We allude to communal forestry ; that is, a village, as a corporation, owns an area of forest land, which is placed under scientific forest management. A comprehensive working plan is made and good roads are carried into all parts of the wood. The annual crop of timber is harvested and care taken to keep this well within the annual yield. The income from this com- munal forest belongs to the town or city. From it local ex- penses are paid and no taxes are levied. There are cities in Ger- many where such forests not only furnish the money as above stated, but in which free kindergartens, free baths and free music are provided. Such a condition seems to be almost ideal. It would be good as far as it could be adapted to our more exacting life, but we require more than the average German citizen.
It is not too much to say, however, that the water supply of our cities and larger towns should come from a forested area. The collecting surface should be as near the stream head as pos- sible, and beyond possibility of any contamination. The town or city should absolutely own and control this area. There can be no doubt that under a proper system of management, if the area were covered with forests, almost every town or city of more than twenty thousand inhabitants in this Common- wealth could have water brought to the doors of its citizens in a few years without tax or charge to them.
Here forestry lends its services directly to the health, lon- gevity and comfort of our citizens.
A wooded wilderness is necessarily a forest, but every forest is not necessarily a wooded wilderness. The average American fails to recognize that a forest may be intersected by well kept roads, which lead to towns or cities within a territory which is,
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in the main, devoted to the production of timber. This mis- apprehension of the true significance of the term has done infinite harm to the forestry cause in this country. Forestry exists for the purpose, primarily, of perpetuating lumbering and manufactur- ing interests, and to do the work which is required it is necessary that the workmen live in or near the forest. It would simplify our conception of this whole problem if we were to regard for- estry as that branch of agriculture whose business it is to pro- duce trees.
It is rarely given to a generation which begins a great reform to see that reform consummated. The forestry movement has been in every sense a genuine reformation. It has changed the thoughts of practically an entire nation. This of itself would certainly indicate that there was a widespread recognition of the fact that our civilization was taking, in part, a dangerous di- rection. No mere local movement could have accomplished the change which we have witnessed within the lifetime of a genera- tion. The part Pennsylvania has borne in working this change is one of which the State may well be proud, and it is proper that this be placed upon record.
"On April 3d. 1872, Richard Haldeman, of Pennsylvania, introduced into Congress, by unanimous consent, a bill to encour- age the planting of trees, and for the preservation of woods on the public domain." He alluded to the measure on April IIth, as introducing a new feature into the legislation of the country. Of course Mr. Haldeman was not ignorant of what had been done in forestry in Germany and in France, and he was fully aware that but very few of our citizens would recog- nize the far-reaching consequences of the movement which he was inaugurating. It is almost certain that Mr. Haldeman himself could not have foreseen that within thirty years the gen- eral government would have set aside many millions of acres on the public domain to be devoted forever to the production of tim- ber. After all, this prosaic world does move more rapidly than
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its most progressive citizens. No better address upon forestry than that of Mr. Haldeman, or better adapted to the period of its delivery, has been made up to this time in this country. The measure which he advocated was defeated. The agitation, how- ever, was productive of good results, for the following March Mr. Donnell of the committee on Public Lands submitted a re- port upon the cultivation of timber and the preservation of for- ests. We may well suppose that this was, in part, led up to by the recommendation of the American Association for the Ad- vancement of Science that the subject of national forestry be in- quired into, and the fact that the President had made this recom- mendation the subject of a special message.
The late Washington Townsend, then representing Chester and Delaware counties in Congress, bore a conspicuous part in directing the movement which resulted in sending the late F. B. Hough abroad to study forestry conditions and report upon the same. Mr. Hough's volumes were of necessity hastily prepared. They contained many partial statements, and were not without error in some respects. The marvel is that they were as valuable as they have since proven, and to this day they may be studied with advantage. The dates of publication of Mr. Hough's re- ports are 1877, 1878, 1879 and 1882. In the meantime our State Board of Agriculture had recognized the importance of this new movement. Thomas J. Edge, then secretary of that representative body of farmers, lost no time in directing atten- tion to the forestry agitation in its relations to agriculture. The consequences were that in the report of the State Board of Agri- culture there were no less than five papers upon the forestry prob- lem, as it then presented itself to us. The report of the next year contained two papers upon the same subject. Looked at from our present standpoint these papers were immature, partial expres- sions of great truths; but they paved the way to better things.
The most valuable paper upon forestry which the times then had produced in Pennsylvania was the report of Dr. Roland, of
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York. It contained much valuable information, but did not, in fact could not then, point out clearly what was to be done. It is quite true that we had, then as now, the examples of older countries where forestry was a well established science, to fol- low; but these were then unapproachable ideals. There never was a time when a young government did, or could, by a single act introduce such a perfected system into its working parts without creating strain. The citizenship of the country under a popular government would ask, why all these new offices, why this increased expense ?
Besides all this it is more than doubtful whether any foreign system of forestry would be, as an unmodified whole, the best thing possible in Pennsylvania, or the United States.
The legislative session of 1885 authorized the Governor to ap- point an Arbor day, and in 1887 a similar enactment was placed upon the statute books. The day has accomplished, through the public school system of the State, very gratifying results. Though it has not led to the creation of any forests, it has brought about an increased respect for a tree, which in itself is a most hopeful sign in a nation which had devoted most of its early energies to destroying forests and which, rightly enough for the time, considered land worth more without the trees than with them.
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