Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 December 1895 — THE CHRISTMAS TREE STATE. [ARTICLE]

THE CHRISTMAS TREE STATE.

Great Demand la Annually Made On the Forests ot Maine. Not all who desire a Christmas-tree for the holiday merrymakings can sally forth, armed with a hatchet, and hew from their own acres. Therefore at each Christmas season great demand is made on the forests of Maine for yonng spruces. No tree but an evergreen will do, and no evergreen but the spruee presents the delicate, feather - flat, clean - limbed branches of dark perennial shade, which throw out by contrast the brightness of the suspended presents and favors. On Sunday, the fifth of December, 1891, ten car-loads of Christmas trees for New York were detained in the Portland yard because they were loaded so that it was Impossible to work the brakes. This objection was overruled, and the sweetsmelling freight was allowed to proceed to its destination. How the cars were loaded can easily be described, but the fragrance of twenty-five thousand freshly cut evergreen trees must be left to the reader's imagination. The ten cars, all “flats,” or platform cars, were each thirty-four feet long, loaded eight feet high, and all came from .the small station of Wiscasset, which lies at the head of one of the numerous bays on the coast of Maine. At regular intervals about each car, four on each side and two at each end, ( were stout spruce stakes, originally Christinas trees which might have done jduty at the Castle De Blunderbore. These rose to the top of the load, which was lim‘ifetjlp a height that would clear all overhead bridges on the road. .In .this space the trees were packed jlefcttiwise, butts to the front and rear [tops to the center, so compactly that the loaded car was one solid block of green. ,Each car held about twenty-five hundred (trees, large and small, tied in bundles of (four. From six hundred and fifty to [seven hundred bundles were packed in a par, so that the ten car-load lot contained twenty-five thousand trees at least. The marketing of Christmas trees is a Maine specialty. Every year speculators purchase the right to cut trees from the land owners, paying half a cent, one cent, pnd two cents apiece for trees from eight to twelve years old on the stump. Then the natives are hired to cut and bring them to the shipping point, where they cost the speculator from ten to twelve cents each, loaded on the car. He pays also for their shipment to New Vork—sixty-seven dollars per car, or about two and one-half cents per tree. The trees retail in New York for from one to five dollars each, according to their size. The same quality of tree can be purchased on the street, in the city of Portland, at from twenty-five to fifty cents each, while in other parts of the State boys who wish for Christmas trees sally forth and cut them for themselves. —Youths’ Companion.