Where antique heart pine comes from

Before the American Revolution, longleaf pine...the source of heart pine...dominated the landscape in the South. Once the largest continuous forest on the North American continent, the longleaf ecosystem ran along the coastal plain from Virginia's southern tip to eastern Texas.

Where there was once approximately 90 million acres, less than 10,000 acres of oldgrowth heart pine remain today. Put another way, what was once 41 percent of the entire landmass of the Deep South now covers less than 2 percent of its original range. The hardwood trees had been growing for centuries, producing only an inch of growth in diameter every thirty years. It takes up to 500 years for heart pine to mature.

Why heart pine is the 'wood that built America'

As the United States was formed and began to grow and prosper, settlers quickly discovered the immense value of the towering but slender hardwood trees. Because of its strength and durability, heart pine was declared the "King's wood" for shipbuilding when America was first colonized. As settlers moved southward, originalgrowth heart pine was steadily logged and was used for log cabins in the 1700s and 1800s, and later for the construction of fine Victorian homes, hotels and palaces. Heart pine once framed four of every five houses in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, floored Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Washington's Mount Vernon, and buttressed the keel of the USS Constitution ("Old Ironsides").

Heart pine played a key role in the growth and development of the United States as an economic power. As industrial America began to flex its muscles later in the 19th century, heart pine was transported in tall ships made of heart pine up the Eastern seaboard and over to Europe. The Herculean wood provided flooring, joists and paneling for homes and factories, as well as timbers for bridges, warehouses, railroad cars and wharves. Also appreciated for its beauty, it was utilized in Victorian hotels and palaces. Anytime you visit an old building, look around. You are likely to recognize heart pine still hard at work and in excellent condition.

One example is the pilings from the shipping port in Savannah built by General Oglethorpe in the early 1700s. When the dock was torn down a few years ago, Goodwin reclaimed them to provide an antique heart pine darker than most. Once it was milled again, the wood is the color of the heart pine floor in George Washington’s Mount Vernon...without waiting 250 years for the color to age.

By 1850 the South had constructed only 2000 miles of railroad, so the best way to transport longleaf logs to downstream sawmills was to use the rivers. The common method for timbering was to cut trees with axes and drag logs with oxen or mule teams to the riverbanks. As more and more people moved to the South, lumber companies began to take their crews further inland in search of more heart pine. Loggers dug manmade canals to carry the inland logs to the river.

You couldn't go anywhere in the South without running into the naval stores industry, which tapped the longleaf for its valuable resin. Longleaf resin was used in paints, soaps, weatherproofing products, shoe polish and medicines and made the U.S. the world leader in naval stores until the middle of the twentieth century. Even baseball players used resin on their equipment and ballerinas on their toe shoes to improve their performance.

Remaining forests protected today

Today, original-growth heart pine is as rare as sunken treasure, with less than 10,000 protected acres of original-growth Longleaf Pine forests remaining. Antique heart pine and heart cypress timbers are revered for their rich history as much as their beauty and durability. Sadly, clear-cutting of the vast southern forests in the late 1800s wiped out virtually the entire range of original-growth heart pine and heart cypress trees. The only place to find the last vestiges of this antique wood is reclamation from old buildings or where it was left behind--under water in the southern rivers used by many timber operations in the 1800s to raft their logs to nearby sawmills.