Heart of The Matter
By Lynn Nesmith
Southern Living magazine

When Cheryl Smith was in the market for a house in Tampa, location wasn’t an issue. “I knew I wanted to live in Hyde Park,” she says without hesitation. “It’s a friendly, established neighborhood with lots of trees, and it’s close to downtown.”

Sometimes older houses in wonderful neighborhoods lack modern conveniences. But Cheryl was lucky. She found a historic home with a recently updated kitchen. “I was immediately drawn to the wonderful finishes on the cabinets. And I liked the layout and appliances,” she adds.

The cabinets are a combination of antique heart pine and inset panels of new California pine with a light stain finish. Simple carpenter details highlight the textured grain of the darker heart pine. “We deliberately chose a light finish for veneer insets to contrast and accentuate the heart pine,” says kitchen designer Bill Dostall.

In the process of buying the house, Cheryl learned the cabinets were made of river-recovered pine. “I had no idea what that meant at the time,” she says. “I just knew I liked the neighborhood—and the kitchen.”

BURIED TREASURES
What exactly is river-recovered heart pine? Historically, heart pine referred to the original slow-growth, longleaf pine trees that once covered the Southeast. Because of the slow growth of the longleaf pine, the wood is tight-grained and more dense than most pine trees.

Sadly, clear cutting of these trees in the 1800s nearly wiped out the region’s vast virgin forests. In the 19th century, though, the most common method to transport logs to nearby sawmills was to float the timbers down river. Many of the heaviest and largest logs sank to the bottom of these rivers. These lost “sinkers” have been preserved in an oxygen-free environment for more than 100 years, which, along with their high-resin content, has retained the unique qualities of the wood.

Today the sunken logs from the bottoms of the rivers once used to convey timbers are being harvested. They are brought by hand to the surface once at a time. “The process is not anything like a typical lumber operation,” says George Goodwin, who operates one of Florida’s oldest companies that specializes in river-recovered and vintage wood. “The biggest difference is the fact that our crews don scuba gear instead of traditional lumberjack apparel.”