I listened this afternoon to a discussion about walnut trees shading the highway. I have no practical experience to know whether these trees do any damage to crops on account of the shade, but supposing you raised a fine walnut tree along the highway and the tree begins to bear. Would not the products you get from that tree more than offset the damage it does to a crop close to the tree? I once had an aunt, when I was a very small boy, and it seems to me she said that she raised forty bushels of black walnuts on one tree. I saw that big hickory tree today. They claimed they raised fifteen bushels on that tree. I thought forty bushels was a lot to come off of one tree.
Mr. Bixby: That was in the husk. There have been records of that kind in the husk.
Senator Penney: This bill has been introduced and passed and Mr. Linton, who is practically the author of this bill, is desirous of having this followed up in the different states. I think it would be a good plan. What better investment could you make to beautify our highways than the planting of good trees? In the southern part of the state of Michigan there are quite a lot of good trees, black walnuts, butternuts, which not only add beauty to your highways but are useful in many ways. During the war we know that the government scoured the whole country to find walnut trees to make stocks for guns, and to use in airplanes for propeller blades. They used the shucks to make gas masks. The trees could be made of further service to man by planting them as memorial trees. And again they furnish food, not only bear leaves but food.
I would like to hear a discussion upon this bill from those who are from other states. I would like to hear what their opinion might be as to the different provisions of this bill.
President Linton: The subject is now open for discussion. I am sure that there are those here who would perhaps offer amendments to that bill. They might desire to modify it some. They might desire to add other features to it. For instance, it might be well to recognize the desire at the present time to save useful bird life throughout the country. That might be stated in the title to this bill as one of the purposes of roadside planting. Certainly that would be one of the results of road side planting.
Senator Penney: The bill provides not only for planting trees, but for planting shrubs along the highway. That created quite a fight in the legislature. One fellow thought we were going to buy a whole lot of nursery stock and spend a pile of money. We are not. But here was the idea. Those shrubs are useful not only for furnishing food for birds, that are necessary to farmers, but are useful sometimes to prevent shifting sand, and also snow from covering the highways. You have often noticed that the railroad companies put up fences at different points to prevent snow from drifting on the tracks. Bushes can serve the same purpose.
President Linton: The subject is now before the body for discussion.
Mr. Littlepage: To print the newspapers in the United States it requires enough wood each year to make one cord of timber from Boston clear across the American continent and across to the Hawaiian Islands and further. Most of that, perhaps half of it, comes from Canada. There is cut from the forests of the United States every year timber to make wood pulp enough to make one cord of wood from Boston to Liverpool. That is just for newspapers. That has nothing to do with furniture, with houses, with cross ties, with everything else, which are estimated to take four times as much. Now if that be true there is cut every year from the forests of the United States enough timber to make four cords from Boston to Liverpool. That is going on every year. We met here seven years ago. In that seven years there has been enough timber cut from the forests of the United States to make twenty-eight cords of wood from Boston to Liverpool. Now when you begin to contemplate that you see what is happening.
Roadside planting furnishes one of the greatest opportunities. There are many details that will have to be worked out. The bill which the Senator and our distinguished President have given much consideration to seems to be working along the right lines. Many difficulties will come up from time to time but this is one of the things that this Association ought to get behind. Here is a great need, a fundamental need, when you think of the figures which I gave you. Here is one of the opportunities to fulfill that need. We, as an organization of tree planters, ought to get busy to help to work out the details and difficulties that cannot be all foreseen in the application of the machinery of roadside planting and the particular laws of each state. Some people think sometimes that because a fellow is a lawyer he knows all the laws. There are forty-eight different states in the Union. I know that every state in the Union has a statute of limitations. It is three years in the District of Columbia. It is six years here. The fundamentals, the machinery of laws, are different in these particular states. Now then, what are the duties and what are the opportunities? A duty and an opportunity are rather more or less synonymous after all. It is for this Association to get actively behind this proposition, and help adapt this legislation to each particular state, keeping in mind that the fundamental thing is to plant trees. We are meeting here in Lancaster, Pa., a city to which I have always turned my thoughts with great pride, because here was the home of the founder of the great common school system of America, Thaddeus Stevens. Do you suppose when he began to originate the system which has made America that he could foresee all the difficulties, that he could foresee the difficulties in Texas, in Indiana, in New York? He started with a principle, and that principle has been adopted and developed and worked out in each particular state, until we have the great forty-eight different big school systems of America. We can take this proposition and by working it out, adapting it to the particular machinery, the particular laws, and meeting the particular difficulties, we can work it out until it becomes a great monument. We must plant trees.
Mr. McGlennon: I want to say a word with regard to Senator Penney's reference to the importance of shrubs as a protection to the roadways from shifting sand. Mr. Volbertsen, my collaborator in my filbert enterprise in Rochester, got his early education in horticulture in Germany when a young man of twenty years of age, and he informed me the other day that along the side of the railroads' right of way, filberts were planted very extensively, in different parts of Germany, for the maintenance of the roadbed, to protect them from shifting sand. Not only that but they garnered wonderful crops of nuts.