Salvaging Antique Lumber
This Old House, May/June 1995

Would you look for lumber at the bottom of a river? If you needed choice wood for flooring or a cabinet front, would you don scuba gear? That’s what George and Carol Goodwin and their crew do.

Goodwin Hear Pine of Micanopy, Florida, makes a business of river recovering century-old logs from riverbeds, drying and milling them, and then selling the prized lumber. Heart pine is the wood of the longleaf pine, Pinus palustris. These 80- to 125- foot-tall trees used to cover 40 percent of the southeastern coastal plain from Virginia to eastern Texas.

Once the most common of woods, it is now so rare and valuable that it’s worth the time and effort it takes to reclaim it. Salvagers remove it from old buildings or fish it by hand out of the muddy bottom of the Suwannee River, as the Goodwin’s do.

Heart Pine tells the story of the American settlement. When European immigrants started to arrive on the eastern seaboard in large numbers, they needed food and shelter. The longleaf forests were logged and turned into farmland. As strong as steel for their weight, the long, straight timbers became beams or ship masts.

The forest supplied 200 billion board feet of wood before they were depleted. Today, less than one percent of the nation’s forests are replanted longleaf pine; of the original 75 to 85 million acres of old growth, less than 10,000 remain. A slower grower (it takes 30 years to add an inch in diameter), the long-leaf pine is dense, long-grained and very resinous: mature trees were tapped for turpentine.

The resin also resisted decay—longleaf pine served as the pressure treated wood of its day---and helped to preserve the logs that sank at the river bottom. River currents gradually washed away the outer shell of bark and sapwood, leaving the harder heart pine. “Most of the logs that were easy to find have gone,” says George Goodwin. “We have to search in the deeper water these days.” After divers haul them up, salvaged logs are winched onto a trailer to finish their interrupted trip to the mill.

Sawmills were different 100 years ago; so were cutting patterns. To produce lumber that will match boards in old homes, George Goodwin purchased an old sawmill. “I had to track down some old-timers to teach me how to use the equipment, and how to mill the lumber the right way,” he says. Here, a 50-year-old Frick saw cuts into a whole river log.

At the mill, the logs are checked for major flaws and cut into manageable lengths. Those that pass muster are fed through the saw mill, which can handle boards up to 24 inches wide. The boards are sorted by size and grade, and stacked outdoors for two to three months to air dry. The boards then go into a dehumidifying kiln for 14 to 21 days of seasoning. Once the moisture content is low enough, the boards are milled into final sizes. Unacceptably large knots, splits and pitch pockets (little pools of resin) are cut out. In grading their lumber for sales, the Goodwins follow the last published standards for heart pine: from the 1924 Lumber Men’s Yellow Pine and Cypress Reference Book.

Goodwin Heart Pine sells three main grades of lumber: “select,” “vertical” and “curly.” The terms are confusing because they encompass both sawing technique and presence of knots. Customers who order “select” will get wood wit ha few tight, sound knots. Only if they specify “FAS” will even one surface be free of knots. Regardless, “select” boards will be “flatsawn” (or “plainsawn”), simply sliced from the log. Viewed on end , flat-sawn boards have annual growth lines running nearly up and down at the edges and horizontally in the middle. Thus, they can cup as the growth rings straighten out. Not so “vertical” sawn boards, which account for about 25 percent of Goodwin’s sales. Their rings run perpendicular to the face, so the wood is more stable.

Most lumberyards charge about the same for a 12-inch-wide board as they would for three 4-inch-wide boards of the same thickness and length. Because its supply is limited, Goodwin charges a steep premium for wide, thick boards. Regular “select” lumber costs $3.95 a board foot for pieces 1 inch thick and 3 inches wide, but $11.58 for the same volume in pieces 2 ½ inches thick and 12 inches wide. Prices for “select” and “vertical” grades don’t vary according to whether wood is rough, planed smooth or milled for tongue-and-groove. And the rare “curly” grade? It’s $16 or more a board foot, with no choice as to knots.

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