few black walnuts of large size, and met with men who were travelling about purposely to find and buy them in all accessible places. In the North Carolina forestry exhibit at the St. Louis Exhibition in 1904, I saw a walnut log from a tree in Jackson County, Kentucky, over 12 feet long and 52 inches in diameter which had evidently been lying long in the forest, and had been repeatedly burnt over, which produced over 800 cubic feet of timber, and was sold, as I was told, for $800. I heard of another still standing in Kentucky which was valued at $1000.
These great trees are now hardly to be seen except in remote regions where it is impossible to get them out, and when I visited the Lower Wabash Valley in southern Illinois, where Prof. R. Ridgway? found the largest deciduous trees in the United States, I did not see one of great size. Dr. J. Schneck, who was my guide and who knows the flora of this region better than anyone, gives in his Catalogue of the Flora of the Lower Wabash, the measurements of a tree taken by himself as follows :—Circumference, at 3 feet above the swell of the root, 22 feet; height of trunk to first branch, 74 feet; total height, 155 feet. Prof. Ridgway measured another 15 feet in girth at 3 feet, and 71 feet to the first branch, where the trunk was 3 feet in diameter. Assuming such trees to have measured 12 feet in girth in the middle they would contain 600 to 700 feet of clean timber in the first length alone, and now be worth as much as many acres of the land they grew on would fetch when cleared for agriculture.
But in regions which have colder summers and poorer soil, the black walnut does not attain anything like these dimensions, and I have seen none in New England which equal the best trees in Britain. Emerson* speaks of one in the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, Mass., as measuring 6 feet 3 inches at 3 feet from the ground, and the tree which he figures growing near Roslyn was a poor specimen of small size.
In Canada it was once abundant in the rich forests of Southern Ontario, but almost all the old trees have been cut down, and plantations are now being made in various parts of Ontario and Western Quebec, and in Alberta and British Columbia, as well as in many parts of the United States from Kansas to California.
Black walnuts of great size are indeed now so rare that I have been unable to procure a really good photograph of the tree in its native forest, and there is none in Pinchot and Ashe’s Timber Trees of N. Carolina. These authors say that it bears seed abundantly only every three or four years, and that young seedlings are not common except in low fertile, rather open lands, or in meadows which border streams. The growth is very rapid until the tree has reached a large size; only small trees send up shoots from the stump.
The tree, however, has been so largely planted in many parts of the States and in Canada, and succeeds so well, even so far west as British Columbia, that it may again become generally useful as a timber tree.
Proc. U.S. Nat. Museum, 1882, p. 49.
2 Trees of Massachusetts, i. 213.
