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FACTS ABOUT GEORGIA 47
Forest Resources of Georgia
BY ROLAND M. HARPER, Ph. D.
About 60 per cent, of the area of Georgia is still wooded, and
although much of the forest has been severely culled, it will
probably average 5,000 feet (board measure) per acre at the
present time, making the total stand of timber about one hundred
and fifteen billion feet. In 1913 the U. S. Bureau of Corpora
tions, in the course of a searching investigation of the lumber
industry of the United States, reported 11,130,000 acres owned
or leased by lumbermen in Georgia (outside of 19 mountain
counties with a combined area of 5602 square miles, or nearly
one-tenth of the State), with the following stand of merchantable
timber, in billion feet: Long-leaf pine (doubtless including slash
pine also), 18.5, short-leaf pine (two species, and probably also
bastard pine and spruce pine), 13.2, cypress (two species), 2.8,
and hardwoods, 11.5. This does not include small and worthless
timber, and a considerable area of wood lots, etc., on farms.
Leaving the mountains out of the estimate excludes all the white
pine and hemlock in Georgia, but takes in all the cypress, all the
long-leaf pine except that in Floyd county, and about three-
fourths of the short-leaf pine and half the hardwood. If the
average lifetime of a tree in Georgia is 100 years, the annual
yield of timber would be 2 per cent, of the total stand, or slightly
over two billion feet.
According to the last government census, there were in this
State in 1910, 2,083 active sawmills, which cut during the preced-
Augusta is an important
cotton market, a center
of textile industry, and
perhaps the only city in
the South owning a
large water power de
velopment.