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'NDER the name of the Pisgah National Forest, the people of the United States have recently acquired the largest area of scientifically forested lands in the country. It was part of the great Biltmore estate of the late George W. Vanderbilt, and comprises ninety thousand acres of wild commercial forest in North Carolina, rich in hardwood, lined with trout streams whose banks are fringed with rhododendron, and forming the most beautiful reserve in a wild state that has ever been established. It is not a park. It is a great forest flowing over the Southern Appalachians, a forest that will yield an annual crop of wood to the Government, just as the experimental farms at the agricultural schools yield wheat and oats to those institutions.

Overlooking the valley of the French Broad River, this area is precipitous and lofty, a dozen or more summits of the great Pisgah Range rising above six thousand feet. The rainfall is heavy, and the creeks and streams flow with swift currents which erode the steep unprotected slopes into deep gullies, carrying down into the streams vast quantities of soil and sediment from areas which have been wastefully lumbered, cleared, or burned over. The protection of the forest cover, therefore, becomes a vital factor in the navigability of the large rivers fed from this territory.

It was long ago Mr. Vanderbilt's idea to pick up tracts of wornout and devastated lands in the vicinity of Biltmore, and bring them up to a high state of cultivation and improvement, including both farm lands and forested tracts. At first he expected to content himself with the purchase of a few hundred acres, but when he began to plan his chateau-modeled house, he soon found that he was getting too much house for his land, and then he started in to acquire other property, until now the Biltmore estate, proper, comprises

some eighteen thousand acres of highly
productive farm lands, forests, and
large nurseries of flowering shrubs and
forest trees.

Mr. Vanderbilt's method of lumber-
ing was true conservation. Viewed
from the summits of imposing peaks,
there stretched before the eyes illimit-
able areas of forest, some of it virgin
and other portions lumbered, but under
such judicious cutting that at a dis-
tance only a forester could be certain
that the lumberman had been at work;
to the uninitiated, the whole forest
seemed practically untouched.

The lumbering contracts provide for
the cutting of poplar to
the cutting of poplar to a stump diame-
ter of sixteen inches, and of other
woods to fourteen inches. The con-
tracts have been on the basis of twelve
dollars an acre, and run for twenty
years. These contracts will continue
under federal supervision. At their ex-
piration, the forest will be ready to be
cut over again, and thereafter will fur-
nish a perpetual income to the Gov-
ernment as well as fully preserve the
watershed.

The simple fact that under this con-
tract actual lumbering has been in full
swing for several years at the price of
twelve dollars an acre disproves the
oft-repeated statement that "forestry
nonsense and practical lumbering can't
be mixed together", and that the lum-
berman must be left to his time-hon-
ored practice of skinning the forest
lands and leaving a trail of waste and
desolation behind him.

Members of the Forest Reservation Commission look upon the Pisgah Forest as by far the best government purchase yet made, because the forest is in the finest possible condition and less than one-half of one per cent can be classed as burned-over land. The area also contains improvements in the form of buildings, and excellent roads and trails, which leave the Forest Service little to be desired in connection with its administration of the forest.

What the actual value of this unex

It is a great forest, covering the Southern Appalachians-a forest that will yield an annual crop of wood to the Govern ment, just as the experimental farms at the agricultural schools yield wheat and oats to those institutions.

BELONGS TO THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT