is what Anna Ward had observed, namely, the natural colonization of fence-rows by native trees, a feature of the island landscape that has persisted up to the present day.496

The effects of the extraction of fence materials on the forest: some conclusions — (1) It is evident that the need for each settler to have at hand on his farm an area of woodland capable of supplying his annual fencing requirements was an important factor in the retention of a part of each farm as woodland. As a result in many parts of the island the need for fencing materials played a role in the survival of the forest, especially in areas where all of the land would have been suitable for clearance, such as in the areas under climax hardwood forest.

(2) In such hardwood areas, it is likely that before forest clearance began the trees that were later to prove the most valued for fencing purposes (i.e. the spruce, fir and poplar) would have been relatively scarce. However, the various types of disturbance associated with settlement (such as forest fires, and the extraction of timber and of firewood) would over time have led to an increase in these tree species.

(3) The low size requirements for fencing materials meant that even the smaller trees of the forest — trees that would have been of no value for export, or in ship-building or house construction — had a value, and were thus subject to harvest. However, it also meant that because of their use for fencing the chances of such small trees reaching the larger sizes that would have been useful for other purposes was reduced.

(4) Was the harvest for fencing of trees in farm woodlots carried out in any self-consciously managed way with the aim of maintaining the long-term sustainability of the resource? I doubt whether this was so — at least there is no evidence to indicate such in the historical literature — though some farmers must have developed empirically (through trail and error) a management system that aimed (or perhaps simply hoped for) sustainability

York, Lot 34 (p. 81); and William Howard on the South Wiltshire Road, Lot 32 (p. 110).

‘96 In ‘Meacham's Atlas‘ (Allen 1880) such colonisation of field boundaries by trees is evident in the views of the residences of Henry Longworth of Charlottetown Royalty (p. 46), and of Abraham Gill of Little York, Lot 34 (p. 54).

76

— at least it would have been in their interest to do $0. 497

(5) However, where this annual harvest took place on ‘unoccupied land’ (whether for private use or for commercial sale), as on the large areas of poor ’barren’ land in the west of the province, I suspect, that it was carried out mostly as an ’asset-stripping’ activity for immediate financial gain (as had been so in all parts of the island for the harvest of the larger timber for export), rather than with the aim of maintaining a future sustainable harvest. And anyway, given the very poor soils in most of these ’barrens’, it is likely that it would have taken a very long time for the trees that were harvested, even though they were small, to be replaced by new growth of similar Slze.

FIREWOOD

For almost the whole of the colonial period the forests of Prince Edward Island were the principal source of the wood that provided the energy required to heat homes and do the cooking. However, we are able to get only a partial picture of the firewood economy and its effect on the forest, which we have to piece together from short

anecdotal comments scattered throughout the records.498

‘97 It is of interest that many settlers had come from parts of the

British Isles where a system of woodland management known as ‘coppicing‘ had developed through trail and error over hundreds of years as a way of providing a sustained long-term supply of small wood for fencing and other needs (see Peterken 1996, pp. 388- 391). Essentially ‘coppicing‘ involved the periodic harvest of trees and shrubs at regular intervals (commonly in the range of 4 to 30 years), followed by the vigorous regrowth of the trees from the cut stumps or from root suckers. However, there is no mention of this specific form of management in the island historical literature.

‘98 Ideally it would be nice to be able to estimate the total amount

of firewood consumed on the island from the beginning of British settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. But in order to do so, many ever-changing variables would have to be factored in (many of which would only be capable of crude estimation): for example, the number of dwellings, the number of fireplaces or stoves in each, the rate of replacement of the inefficient open fireplace with the cast-iron stove. the type of firewood used, the severity ofthe winter, etc. And to attempt to go a stage further and convert that value into an acreage of forest capable of providing such a requirement is fraught with even more variables. It is interesting that even in a study of a much larger jurisdiction than Prince Edward Island (the whole of the United States from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century), Williams (1989) (pp. 75-81, 133-39) also came up against a paucity of useful statistical and quantitative data on such a basic value as the number of cords of wood burned per house per year. Even so, many of the factors that he highlights are applicable to Prince Edward Island, though I am not prepared to apply to the island his conjecture that “it seems