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History of Heart Pine-“The Wood that Built America”
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 old-growth 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,
original-growth 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.
Some of the densest, heaviest logs felled by hand more than
a century ago rolled off the rafts during the float trip to
the mills and Goodwin is one of the few manufacturer (and
definitely the largest and most established) to dive for and
recover these irreplaceable antique heart cypress. Others
logs sank into storage at the landings, then were abandoned
and preserved beneath the water. They have tumbled there for
years with the shifting currents and freshets of such waterways
as the Santa Fe, Apalachicola and Suwannee River in Northeast
Florida and the St. Mary's, Satilla, Altamaha and Flint rivers
in Georgia. It’s a slow, time-consuming process to recover
the logs by hand, but the beautiful flooring it produces is
well worth effort.
Characteristics of Heart Pine (Longleaf Pine or Pinus
palustris)
- Red tones: light rose to deep burgundy in color
- Beauty: famous for a handsome variety of grain patterns
- Durability: heartwood lasts for centuries, comparable
in
hardness to Red Oak
- Rarity: once the dominant landscape of the coastal
Southeast, now covers less than 3% of its original range
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