*** Source: Thompson, Robert A., Historical and descriptive sketch of Sonoma County, California. Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877, 122 pgs. Notice: This data is donated to the Public Domain by TAG, 2004, and may be copied freely by anyone to anywhere. *** ---page 29 --- standing is valued at two dollars per thousand feet. One hundred and fifty thousand feet to the acre, six million feet on a forty-acre tract, is an average of good land. The very finest on the margin of the streams would produce at least eight hundred thousand feet to the acre, and the yield runs downward from that figure to twenty-five thousand feet to the acre. The redwood belongs exclusively to the foggy coast-regions; south of San Francisco the supply has been cut out, and as it grows nowhere else, either north or south, Sonoma, Humboldt, and Mendocino counties may be said to have a monoply of this wood, the first in commercial importance on the Pacific coast. Oregon, with her magnificent forests, has none; Puget sound, with a lumber supply incalculable, has no redwood; nor does it grow anywhere on either slope of the Sierra Nevada. The redwood is a close-grained timber, splits true, and is very light in color, like the Eastern cedar. It works beautifully under the plane, and has the merit of retaining its place and shape without warp or shrinkage. Its dura- bility is unquestioned. Hundreds of miles of redwood fences, buiilt twenty years ago, are yet sound, and attest this fact. For fence-posts and railroad ties it is the best wood known, resisting the action of both air and water with matchless durability. Sonoma and Mendocino counties furnished the ties for the Central Pacific Railroad. Every Eastern train that crosses the Sierra rolls over the product of the forests of Sonoma. The redwood is also used for ties on the Southern Pacific, and ties from this county are now laid on the desert of the Colorado. They have gone further, having been shipped to South America for that wonderful road which leads from Lima, in Peru, to the summit of the Andes, seventeen thousand feet above the level of the Pacific. Harry Meiggs, who built the road, was once a mill-owner in this county. He remembered the redwood and its valuable properties, and ordered from our forests ties for his railroad up the Andes. The redwood is a creature of the fog. During the summer months the trade-winds blow along the north coast with great regularity. A dense fog banks up some miles from the shore; later in the day the wind increases, and the fog is driven inland. Detached masses first come in like flying squad- rons, creeping through the foliage of the tallest trees, crawling over the hill- tops, and down the opposite slopes, filling up the canons, and soon hill and valley are enveloped in dripping mist. The foliage of the redwood possesses the peculiar power of condensing this mist and converting it into rain, thus supplying the roots which sustain the mighty bole of the tree with moisture during the long and rainless months of summer. The fog continues through the night, and disappears with the sunrise. This irrigating process is repeated every day during the prevalence of the trades. Few persons can appreciate the grandeur of these redwood forests. Last summer the writer stood upon the summit of the coast range; to the northward lay a sweep of majestic forests unsurpassed on the continent --tier upon tier, range after range of redwoods, until, fifty miles away in the distance, their green crests faded or merged with the colors of the horizon; and could we have compassed the outer bound of vision, beyond, to an equal dis- tance, the eye would have been greeted by unbroken forests. *** end ***