Amount of laths sawed annually, 400,000,000 pieces, at $1.00 per M.
Amount of clap-boards sawed annually, 5,500,000 pieces, at $18.00 per M.
Amount of shingles[ [18] sawed and split annually, 110,000,000 pieces, at $2.50 per M.
Amount of pickets[ [19] sawed annually, 10,000,000 pieces, at $6.50 per M.
The number of men, oxen, and horses employed directly and indirectly on this river alone, would not vary, probably, much from twenty thousand.[ [20]
The reader may inquire with some curiosity, "Where does all this lumber find a market?" We may remind such that Maine has furnished, in times past, the principal part of the lumber consumed in the United States and the West India Islands, though other states in the Union possess immense tracts of fine timber land, which, as the lumbering interests of Maine diminish, will be cut and brought into market. Indeed, such movements have already become quite common in the western part of the State of New York, and also in Pennsylvania and Georgia, as well as in other portions of the country where there are large tracts of timber land, much of which has already been bought up by Eastern lumbermen.
In regard to the consumption of lumber, we may observe that the island of Cuba alone consumes forty millions of feet per annum for the one article of sugar-boxes. The city of Boston is supposed to make use of the same amount per annum for building and cabinet purposes.
Persons unacquainted with the resources of the Penobscot are continually anticipating a decrease in the amount of lumber from the great tribute under which our forests have been already laid; but those who are best qualified to judge estimate that there is now timber enough standing in the forests, on territories through which the waters of the Penobscot pass, to maintain the present annual operations, vast as they are, for fifty successive years, after which it is thought the amount will diminish about one tenth per annum until its final consumption, when, doubtless, the pursuits of the lumbermen will give place to the labors and rewards of husbandry, and to the working of the various veins of mineral deposits already known and yet to be discovered.
A period not as long, probably, as from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to the present time, will transpire, ere the loggers' camp will give place to the farm-house, and golden fields of waving grain relieve the sun-hid earth of the gigantic forests so long cherished upon its laboring bosom.
We can seem to look through the following prophetic verse as a magic spy-glass, which dispels time as well as space, and see the reality it points out pass vividly before the imagination.