Loblolly Milestone

Main sources of the 3,500,000 tons of newsprint paper annually consumed by the U. S. Press are the forests and mills of Canada and Maine. For years Georgia's Dr. Charles Holmes Herty has worked like a beaver to tell people that Southern slash or loblolly pine will make as good newsprint as the Northern firs and spruces. Dr. Herty's point was that in North & South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas are some 150,000,000 acres of second- growth timber, much of it the fast-growing slash pine,* more than enough for all the world if it could be milled into usable newsprint as it is already being milled into wrapping paper.

Backed by the Chemical Foundation, Dr. Herty four years ago commercially made newsprint of Southern pine in a Canadian mill. Last week a more important milestone in the incipient Southern newsprint industry was passed when engineers were commissioned to find a site for "the first Southern newsprint mill," which will be located in 60,000 acres of East Texas pineland.

Decision to build the mill was made at a meeting called in his home town by Vice President Ted Dealey of the Dallas News and Journal. Here Publisher James Geddes Stahlman of the Nashville Banner, chairman of the Southern Newspaper Publishers' newsprint committee, told his fellows that the proposed mill could start shipping an annual 45,000 tons of paper Jan. 1, 1938. Assembled publishers from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas promptly raised $5,000,000 to build the mill, ordered its entire output. Present price of newsprint is $45 a ton. Southern publishers hope their slash pine mill, and others like it, can give them all the newsprint they want for around $27 a ton.

*Present newsprint forest area of North America is 100,000,000 acres.

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