This tree has few names. It is called walnut, black walnut, and walnut-tree. The color of the wood and bark is responsible for the word black in the name, though some people use the adjective to distinguish the tree from butternut which is often known as white walnut. The natural range of black walnut covers 600,000 or 700,000 square miles, and it has been extended by planting. Its northern limit stretches from New York to Minnesota, its southern from Florida to Texas. It is difficult to say where the species found its highest development in the primeval forests, for very large trees were reported in New York, among the southern Appalachian mountains, in the Ohio valley, and beyond the Mississippi in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. The wood cut in Ohio and Indiana has been of greater commercial importance than that from any other portion of its range, but that has been due, in part, to the fact that it came into market before the best of the forest growth had been destroyed in those states, and instead of burning it or mauling it into rails, as eastern farmers did in early times, the farmers of the Ohio valley sold their walnut. Early in the history of black walnut lumbering, Indiana and Ohio came to the front as the most important sources of supply, and they still hold that position, notwithstanding the original forests of those states were supposed to be nearly exhausted long ago. The states cutting most black walnut in 1910, in the order named, were Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Iowa. During the period from 1860 to 1880 black walnut was in much demand for furniture, and the largest yearly cut was 125,000,000 feet. It was during that period of twenty years that operators pushed into all of the out-of-the-way places in search of the timber. Logs were hauled on wagons long distances to bring them out of remote valleys and slopes where no timber buyer had ever gone before. The walnut buyers made such a thorough canvas of the country that it was generally supposed no merchantable tree from Kansas to Virginia would escape. Many a dooryard giant whose wide branches had shaded the family roof for generations, fell before the ax of the contractor who was willing to pay fifty dollars for a single trunk, though it might be twenty miles from the nearest railroad or navigable stream. In spite of the thoroughness of the search, many a walnut tree was spared. Logs have been going to market ever since, and still they go. They will continue to go for years, generations, and centuries; for walnut trees grow with rapidity.