HOW’S YOUR WOOD IQ?

By Dave Gauntt

What do we know about trees? What do we know about wood? I mean specific wood, as in oak, birch, pine, ash, etc. Today, we only seem to know little more than - oak burns best in a fireplace or stove, walnut and cherry make fine furniture, and pine is used for basic construction. Our ancestors knew volumes more. They had to. This country was built of, and ran on, wood. In fact, the economy of colonial America was totally dependent on trees and their products. Yes I know, we’ve all heard that this country ran on a tobacco economy for the first 100 years. That’s true to some degree but even those involved with tobacco were dependent on trees and tree products from cradle to casket. All buildings were made mainly with lumber, wood was the basic fuel, tools were made wholly or partly of wood, vehicles from sleds to ships were wooden. Fences, crates and casks were made of wood, even eating utensils, plates, scoops, and bowls of the common folk (and most folk were common) were wood products. Sugar, soap, tar, and turpentine were obtained from nearby trees, or their wood, and even gunpowder was made with charcoal derived from local forests. This country prospered because it was covered from sea to Mississippi with billions of mature forest trees, referred to for two centuries as “old forest” trees. These were trees, the like of which Europeans had never dreamed of - majestic trees with extremely tall, straight, knot free, tight-grained trunks in numbers and size beyond comprehension. A mind boggling bonanza.

An example of the magnitude of these behemoths is a lone old forest survivor, a walnut tree, that blew down in an 1822 storm in Forestville, NY. It was a black walnut, 36 feet in circumference, almost 200 feet tall, and tapering up 80 feet to the first limb. It had bark a foot thick. This kind of tree was not an exception in the “old forest.” The first export businesses in the colonies involved the shipping of tall tree trunks to England to provide masts for the Royal Navy. The Pilgrims, by 1640, were shipping American timber all over the world in ships made of American wood. His majesty’s scouts were everywhere and as late as the 1830s, trees could still be found in New England with the King’s “BroadArrow” mark branding them as mast trees for the Crown of England. The colonists’s lives were totally dependent on trees and their products for their incomes as well as their daily function.

So, they knew trees - they knew wood. They knew much more than we do. They knew how to cut, care for, and “season” wood to prevent warping. They knew what trees were best for each purpose. “Seasoned wood” referred as much to the time it was felled as to the treatment thereafter. Even the best kiln-dried wood of today cannot equal the warp resistance of wood prepared by the early craftsmen. An example of this can be found in old houses where pine doors made of planks only a half-inch thick and twenty four inches wide are as straight today as the day they were cut. How was it done? First, the “season” was important. The cutting was done from February to April. “If you’d have your flatboards laye, hewe them out in March or Maye,” was the saying. And not in the waxing phase of the moon. Axes would ring during the “old moon of February.” When the tree was felled, the northern half of the trunk was used for flooring, due to its superior resistance to warping, and the southern side was quarter-sawn for other uses. Quarter-sawing, cutting boards on a line as close to the radius of the log as possible, was another practice (not done today) that prevented warping. The resulting lumber was soaked in water (preferably salt water or running water) for a fortnight before being dried. Elm, incidentally, required only five days in salt water. This process had the additional benefit of destroying any insect infestation. The boards were then spread on edge on a drying rack, and turned by hand every day to facilitate even drying. When fully dried, floorboards were “tacked loosely the first year and nailed for good the year after that,” according to “The Builder’s Handbook, 1732.” Bowls were made from burl, a bulbous diseased growth on a trunk or branch, because the irregular grain of burl didn’t split.

Split resistance and toughness dictated that hickory and ash be used for tool handles.

Maples were used by the dry, (or slack) cooper for barrel staves and by the white cooper for boxes. Other uses of maple included charcoal, oven fire fuel, andmaking sugar. Furniture manufacture utilized maple, walnut, cherry, and oak to their best advantage.

Cedar, because of its rot resistance, was used for fence posts, coffins, tubs, pails and shingles. Red cedar’s aromatic “moth-proofing” qualities also resulted in cedar being used to line chests and closets.

Pine afforded light weight with strength, and its pitch content added a degree of rot resistance. These qualities lent themselves to ship construction, and extended to all construction and box manufacture. Pitch pine knots made fine torches in days before electricity, and pine tar was an important early business. The standard covering of barns and bridges was pine.

Chestnut, a hardwood with good warp resistance, made fine wide flooring, and chestnut bark was used as shingling on early barns.

Hickory, tough as it is, was used for some taller masts of early sailing ships. Sumpter beams, the main horizontal support beams of early barns and houses, were usually hewed from a single hickory tree. Young hickory limbs were used as barrel hoops. Hickory shoots and strips were cut in the spring and immersed in a pond until ready for use. They were used for baskets, chair bottoms, and sieves. Hickory was also the choice fuel for the smoke house.

Birch was a highly regarded hardwood and a mainstay for the white cooper, the manufacturer of boxes, pails and baskets. Birch was further used for charcoal, tanning oil, and birch beer, and also made good lye ash for making soap.

Oak, the heaviest native wood, was the choice for framing barns and houses. Odorless and pliable, it was used by the wet cooper for barrel staves, and is also used in basket making. Tree nails, or “trunnels,” were made of oak, the pin oak being the most prominent. It was an excellent fireplace log because it didn’t throw sparks and burned well for a long period.

Ash has many of the qualities of oak and was used for barn framing, tool handles, and barrel hoops as well as being a clean, efficient fuel, that incidentally leaves a lot of fluffy white ash after burning - hence the name.

Spruce combined lightness and strength and was used in long spans and bridge arches.

Sumac was used to make spouts and osage orange made good fencing mateThe list goes on and on.

We’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knows all these skills today. We’re not as close to wood, and we’re not as close to trees as our forbearers were and as a result we’ve lost our appreciation for the earth’s arboreal coat and all it has to offer. William Penn decreed in 1681 that (in Pennsylvania) one acre in five be left in trees. Look around. Have we lived up to that?