ITEMS OF INTEREST August 2, 1913 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

The federal lighthouse bureau and the forest service are cooperating in forest work. This cooperation is confined to the lighthouse districts on the shores of the great lakes in the lumber states of Michigan and Wisconsin. The lighthouse reservations here include a total of nearly five thousand five hundred acres, and range in size from thirty acres at Grand Island, Mich., to one thousand and forty acres at Grand Marais. On some cut-over tracts white pine and Norway pine will be planted; on others the timber already growing will be preserved through use. On two of the reservations the opportunities are excellent for growing cedar and pine for spar buoys and piling, to be used in the work of the lighthouse bureau itself.

San Diego, Cal., is to inaugurate a municipal back-to-the-land movement. Two thousand acres of city land, now idle, will be utilized as a start, and eventually eight thousand acres will be put under cultivation. The plan is to subdivide the pueblo lands into two-and-a-half and five-acre tracts, which will be cleared and put in shape for cultivation, then leased for a period of ten or more years, at a nominal rental, for small farm purpose. For the first year or so it is planned to fix the rental at not more than 5 per cent of the appraised value of the land, probably not to exceed five dollars an acre.

Six million acres of withdrawn public lands were restored to entry during the months of May and June upon approval by the secretary of the interior of the recommendations of the United States geological survey. This action was the result of examination and classification of the lands by the survey, those restored either having been found not to be valuable for power sites, reservoirs, coal, phosphate, or potash deposits, or having been definitely valued as coal lands, and rendered available for purchase under the coal-land law.

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