covered with a worthless scrub of birch, aspen, bird cherry, and other fireweed trees, averaging about ten feet tall.
The white pine is one of the world's most important timber trees. It was originally so abundant, and its wood is so easily worked, that it has been used for almost every purpose that does not require great strength, hardness or durability. Millions of houses have been built of it, and probably hundreds of millions of dry-goods boxes. On account of its growing within easy reach of some of the oldest and most thickly settled parts of this country the value of its lumber which has been placed on the market in the last 300 years doubtless exceeds that of any other North American tree.[1] At the present time the leading states in the production of white pine lumber are Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina, in the order named. But if the figures for the last census had been computed on a basis of equal areas, Massachusetts would rank first, New Hampshire second, and Minnesota third.
The Red or "Norway" Pine (Pinus resinosa) has a range approximately concentric with that of the white pine, but smaller. It is confined to the glaciated region, except that it has been reported from two or three counties in central Pennsylvania and one in West Virginia. In some places in the neighborhood of the upper Great Lakes it forms pure stands with little undergrowth,[2] something like the long-leaf pine forests of the south; but it is more commonly mixed with jack pine, white pine, or other trees. It grows in dry, usually sandy soil, nearly devoid of humus. Its climatic relations are perhaps sufficiently indicated by its distribution.
This species withstands fire almost as well as some of the southern pines to be discussed later, and it resembles them in general appearance, too. In mature trees the branches and foliage are too high up to be injured by ground fires, and the bark is thick enough to be reasonably fireproof. But even when the bark is burned through by a severe fire, making a large scar, the tree is not necessarily killed. At what age it becomes immune to brush fires has not been determined, but in the devastated pine lands of Michigan above mentioned there are many vigorous red pine saplings among the birches and aspens, as well as occasional tall trees of the same species which must have survived many fires.
The wood is so similar to that of the white pine that it is not usually
- ↑ For valuable notes on the economic history of this and other pines see Bulletin 99 of the U. S. Forest Service, by Hall and Maxwell, 1911.
- ↑ There are two illustrations of such forests in Minnesota in The Popular Science Monthly for November, 1912 (p. 535), and another on page 10 of a report on the Wood-using industries of Minnesota published by the State Forestry Board in 1913.
