The County Paper

The Mahogany Tree.

Full-grown, the mahogany tree is one of the monarchs of tropical America. Its vast trunk and massive arms, rising to a lofty height and spreading with graceful sweep over immense spaces, covered with beautiful foliage; bright, glossy, light and airy, clinging so long to the spray as to make it almost an evergreen, present a rare combination of loveliness and grandeur. The leaves are very small, delicate and polished like those of the laurel. The flowers are small and white or greenish yellow. The mahogany lumbermen, having selected a tree, surround it with a platform about twelve feet above the ground, and cut it above the platform. Some dozen or fifteen feet of the largest part of the trunk are thus lost; yet a single log not unfrequently weighs from six or seven to fifteen tons and sometimes measures as much as seventeen feet in length and four and a half to five feet in diameter, one tree furnishing two, three or four such logs. Some trees have yielded 12,000 superficial feet.