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CEU Course: Architectural and Design Uses of Antique Wood (Course
#7398)
Presenters:
Goodwin Heart Pine Company, a custom manufacturer of antique
reclaimed wood products since 1976 and a founder of the newly
formed Reclaimed Wood Council, is committed to an effort to
standardize terminology for reclaimed woods. The first step
in this effort is to arm building design and management professionals
with the facts about specifying reclaimed wood.
Who will benefit from this course:
Building and design professionals responsible for specifying
antique or reclaimed wood in residential or commercial applications
will benefit by learning to:
- Evaluate variations in grades and know what to anticipate
when specifying antique woods.
- Compare characteristics of antique woods with more available
standing timber.
- Analyze manufacturing variations to insure that specs
simplify installation. For example, call for the tightest
milling tolerance in the industry... 3/1000th of an inch.
Why Reclaimed Wood Floors?
Wood floors are the best choice for the environment for several
reasons.
- Manufacturing is cleaner. Steel products give off 24 times
the amount of harmful chemicals than wood product manufacture.
Concrete leaches a great deal of carbon dioxide.
- Wood requires less energy to manufacture. Brick takes
four times more energy, concrete six times and steel 40
times more energy to manufacture than wood.
- Wood actually conserves energy. It takes 15” of
concrete to equal the insulation qualities of just one inch
of wood.
Antique Reclaimed Wood is recycling. River-Recovered logs
were lost once and presumed gone forever… waiting perfectly
preserved. Beams from industrial revolution warehouses are
another good source. Existing wood floors can be pulled up
and reused, even old cider casks may be a great source for
reclaimed wood. Reclaimed wood floors have an extended life
span. They have already proved the test of time. Many are
in homes of the 18th or 19th century and are still walked
on every day. And they offer tremendous design diversity.
The look of an old floor can be completely transformed with
stains, faux finishes and inlays.
Wood floors are the healthy choice, they require fewer chemicals
to clean than other floor coverings, and they don’t
trap dust and fumes in the fibers or grow mold in the grout.
It is the floor of choice for anyone with allergies. Don’t
be surprised if a doctor recommends a wood floor for your
spine and joints. Wood gives a little and easier on your legs
and feet.
Reclaimed wood floors, manufactured without cutting trees,
are a small but growing industry. They are often made by small
companies such as the one pictured here. Reclaimed woods generally
require more labor. They must be carefully sawn to isolate
the defects in a log or beam that may have grown to several
hundred years old and render the highest quality timber possible
to keep waste to a minimum. They are air-dried for weeks or
many months depending on thickness, slowly kiln dried to set
a moisture content baseline for proper acclimation in a home
with central heat and air and graded at sawing, after kiln-drying,
after milling and a final time during packaging to ensure
that you receive the grade you ordered.
Antique Heart Pine… its history and its reclamation
Antique Heart Pine is the most frequently specified reclaimed
wood today. American’s interest in historic preservation
has resulted in a tremendous increase in popularity of reclaimed
woods. The caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge, Independence Hall
and Jefferson’s Monticello are just a few examples of
Antique Heart Pine construction that has survived for centuries.
Reclaimed wood manufacturers have seen a ten-fold increase
in orders and there is an increase of many times more than
that in the number of manufacturers who now advertise reclaimed
woods. The problem with this beautiful wood, if there is one,
is that there are no standards. Standards for Heart Pine were
last published in 1924.
A few of the larger heart pine manufacturers recently came
together to found the Reclaimed Wood Floor Association. The
Association’s work to date has been on Antique Heart
Pine definitions. In the future we will add terms and definitions
to use when specifying other reclaimed woods.
If there is one point to be made, it is that Antique Heart
Pine does not come from standing trees. All of the few remaining
original growth trees… trees old enough to produce mostly
heartwood are protected. Antique Heart Pine comes primarily
from beams out of old warehouses or from logs that sank 100
years ago.
River-Recovery™
Goodwin has been recovering river logs for 25 years. George
Goodwin worked with the Fish & Game and Water Management
and EPA for over 20 years to develop an environmental permit
process to ensure that everyone who pulls logs preserves the
underwater habitat as he does. The logs Goodwin recovers are
rare, perfectly preserved and full of resin and life. Here
is George with a load of logs recently recovered from the
historic Suwannee river in North Florida.
According to the Forest Service this log was likely cut with
a broad axe before 1885 as evidenced by the V-shaped or cone
shaped bottom. After 1885 men used the two-man cross-cut saw
or whipsaw instead of axes. And logs cut after the mid-1880’s
usually have a flat bottom like the log to the left.
Before the American Revolution, longleaf pine… the
source of heart pine… dominated the landscape in the
South. If you look at a map of the U.S., the longleaf ecosystem
ran from the southern tip of Virginia to the eastern tip of
Texas, primarily along the coastal plain.. According to the
Forest Service, the longleaf ecosystem mapped here was once
the largest continuous forest on the North American continent.
150 years ago you couldn’t go anywhere in the South
without running into naval stores activity. White pine was
running out up North and it was discovered that longleaf pine
was harder and more durable. Longleaf also became valuable
for its resin…a raw material used in paints, soap, weatherproofing,
shoe polish and medicines. Baseball pitches used rosin and
so did ballerinas for their toe shoes. Longleaf pine was the
reason the U.S. was the world leader in naval stores until
the middle of the twentieth century.
By 1850 the South had constructed only 2,000 miles of railroad
and the best way to get 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, often using big wheel wagons. As more and more
people moved to the South, lumber companies had to take their
crews further inland in search of more heart pine. Loggers
dug manmade canals like this one shown near Tallahassee FL
to bring inland logs to the river.
Later in the 19th century as industrial America began to
flex its muscles, it was heart pine that provided not only
flooring and interior wood for homes, but also joists for
the factories, timbers for bridges, warehouses, railroad cars
and wharves. Longleaf was shipped all up the Eastern seaboard
and over to Europe for all the old Victorian hotels and palaces.
Even the tall ships shown here at this Fernandina FL port
and many others like it were all made of longleaf pine.
With this incredible progress came the heartbreaking part
of the longleaf pine story. Of the once 85 to 95 million acres,
less than 10,000 acres of old-growth heart pine remain today.
What was once 41% of the entire landmass of the deep South
now covers less than 2% of its original range. Groups such
as The Longleaf Alliance and Association for the Restoration
of Longleaf Pine are helping landowners who want to learn
how to replant longleaf. While longleaf can be a superior
producer, particularly if you have a 40-year rotation, the
conditions for slow growth over hundreds of years probably
will never exist again. The remaining river logs and beams
are a limited supply of a rare and beautiful product.
Amazingly enough, the few remaining longleaf ecosystems are
still the most diverse forest on the North American continent
often sustaining over 60 species per square meter in some
locations. The protected forest shown here is maintained today
primarily for quail hunting. It is open and park-like now
just as it has been for centuries, with a diverse ground cover
of plants and animals. Original-growth is the term we use
today to describe the few remaining forests that were growing
when Columbus landed. Old growth is today a relative term.
In today’s forest, a forty-year-old pine tree might
be called old growth.
Many of the trees cut during the early part of the 20th century
were 300, 400,or 500 years old. It might take up to 30 years
for a tree to put on just one inch of girth. It seems true
in our experience that often the densest and best logs were
the ones that slipped loose and sank to the river bottoms.
Many of the logs we recover show the ‘cat faces’
or scrapes from where they were turpentined on two sides and
continued to grow. Some show lightning strikes that healed
over.
These logs are rich in history and as it turns out offer
a source of information not available anywhere else. The U.S.
is participating in an international effort to monitor the
health of the world’s forests. Goodwin saves the river
log ends for a longleaf forester and dendrochronologist to
study the weather patterns from the tree rings and determine
the fire history in the South… information that is needed
to provide a baseline for monitoring U.S. forests today.
Divers retrieve each log carefully by hand, so there is no
disturbance to the riverbed environment. They are required
by the State of Florida to hold a permit, become trained in
river habitat protection and must pass surprise inspections.
Fred Tatman, a river log recovery diver with whom Goodwin
has worked continuously since 1977, is here to talk to you
about what the work entails.
How do you know the wood is Antique?
Today, heart pine is cherished for its natural beauty, hardness
and durability. When sawn, there are three distinct grain
patterns achieved: vertical, select, and curly are shown together
in this flooring and corner cabinet.
Vertical grain, sometimes referred to as quartersawn or pin-striped
grain, is cut no more than 45 degrees perpendicular to the
face. It requires twice as much sawing and thus wastes some
lumber to produce this more formal grain pattern. It can be
seen here in the floor and trim around the door panels and
in the bead board in the back of the cabinet.
Select grain is an arching or flame grain pattern that is
sawn flat from the log and can be seen in the cabinet doors.
It is the most popular grain pattern seen in wood floors and
this method of sawing can achieve planks up to 8-10”
wide.
Curly grain is a rare, natural burled grain, found in approximately
1 out of every 400 logs pulled from the rivers and is seen
a little bit here in the crown moulding of the cabinet. 
Curly grain is shown in this partners desk created by a designer
in New Mexico. She had a longleaf pine curly log slabbed and
sawn to create this desk in the George Nakashima style with
butterfly joinery. You can see the natural river worn edges
of the log in the desk top. The trestle members show the wane
of the tree and the feet show the ax marks from when the tree
was originally felled.
A Variety of Grades in Grain Patterns
This designer’s bedroom in southern California uses
craftsman style columns and uses a few boards of a darker
color heart pine to create a simply inlay in the River-Recovered™
floor. 
Heart Pine from pilings driven into the Savannah River when
General Oglethorpe was building the port in the early 1700’s
has a darker color than most Antique Heart Pine. It is as
though you were getting a floor the color of George Washington’s
in Mount Vernon without waiting 250 years for it to turn color.
Papa Hemingway’s Key West house has a ‘new’
River-Recovered™ Vertical grain Heart Pine floor to
replace the one that was damaged in a storm. The Vertical
grain shows nothing but pinstripes… none of the arching
or flame grain typical of the majority of Antique Heart Pine
available today.
This National Wood Floor Winner of 1998 was hand scraped
instead of sanded to give the wood more texture and light.
Hand scraping offers a look that cannot be achieved by machines
and one that simplifies maintenance even more. A hand scraped
and oiled wood floor will hide minor blemishes or scrapes
from pet nails.
Stair parts are available in turned balusters or newels to
match almost any standard stair part more commonly available
in oak. Or you can have custom stair parts of mouldings made
to match for historic preservation by having knives ground
to the pattern you need.
Demand for original-growth heart pine has grown considerably
in the last 20 years along with increased interest in historic
preservation and green building efforts. The only other way
to get heart pine is by salvaging timbers from buildings such
as old factories. 
The heart pine floor shown here is in the newly restored
Customs House in Key West, Florida and it came from the Chicago
Ice Plant which had been built just two years after the historic
Chicago fire in 1871. 
For those who want a character or rustic look there are grades
for that as well. The ‘character’ grades include
larger knots, may have considerable nail staining and sapwood
and many find them a good choice for a beach home or mountain
retreat at a more economical price.
According to ‘Longleaf Pine’, published by the
Forest Service in 1946, even a 200 year old longleaf will
average only 65% heartwood. It is the heartwood that contains
most of the resin and longleaf has more resin that any of
the 200+ species of pines. It is this resin that makes longleaf
hard, that makes it durable and that gives longleaf its rich,
red color.
The best grades of Antique Heart Pine are mostly heartwood.
The heart portion of the tree contains from 7 to 24% resin
while the sapwood, or non-heart portion, contains only 1 to
3% resin. So it is the heartwood that is most desirable, yet
all the 200 years and older trees are protected and cannot
be cut. A 75 to 90 year old longleaf pine may have only 30
to 35% heartwood. These standing trees, even when sawn for
heart wood boards, do not have the high-resin content of the
original growth logs and do not offer the same patina and
rich color.
The sapwood of the longleaf pine is the lighter colored wood
on the outer perimeter of the log. It does not deepen in color
and is not as hard as the heartwood. The sapwood does not
offer the durability seen in all heart floors that are over
200 years old and still in good condition. The best grades
do not contain any sapwood. Lesser grades can have up to 50%
sapwood and may today still be called heart pine.
Grading characteristics
Comparison shopping for reclaimed woods can be confusing.
Quartersawn may not be all vertical grain. Some call it ‘linear
grain’. Wide planks are said to have 75% or 85% vertical
grain. This refers to the existence of the arching grain in
the center of each board that is increasing surrounded by
vertical grain on either side of center in many boards as
the width of a heart pine floor increases. Kiln drying is
essential for floors going into homes with modern heating
and air conditioning systems. And beware of those who tell
you to order a good bit extra. With quality grading that should
not be required. You may need to order a small ‘cutting’
allowance, but should not need to order extra for waste if
you specify the grade that you want.
Knots are infrequent in the better grades of Antique Heart
Pine. The longleaf pine was tall and slender with all the
branches at the top of the tree and had relatively few knots
for pine in general. Slight checking is natural in Antique
Heart Pine due to the strong grain and high-resin, but they
should sand out and not be noticeable after installation.
Pitch pockets are crystallized resin and should generally
be solid or can be easily filled. Nail holes in demolition
salvage are generally no more than ¼” in the
better grades.
The heartwood is highly photo reactive and will be a lighter
color right after it is milled. It begins to turn the rich,
red color almost immediately and will be noticeably darker
within several weeks. This color change occurs in many other
woods, for example Cherry is pink when first milled but turns
a red, brown over some weeks or months. To be sure you are
buying the quality of Antique Heart Pine that will give you
this rich color look for two characteristics:
- The growth rings should be dense, averaging 6 or 8 growth
rings per inch in the best grades.
- At least one-third of the wood should be in the darkest
of the pair that make up a growth ring. Called late wood
as it grew denser later in the growing season, the late
wood contains most of the resin.
Installation tips
Expect to use more sandpaper with Antique Heart Pine. Make
sure the sub floor is as flat as possible and start with a
lower grit paper, beginning with a diagonal cut with the sander.
Get the first cut really flat. This will make the rest of
the sanding process much easier. As with all wider plank you
need to keep a tight nail schedule, no more than 6 to 8 inches
apart. Use a nail gun, not a staple gun, as the pressure may
break the tongues and let the wood move too much. For more
installation and finish tips see the ‘The Guide to Owning
Heart Pine’, ‘Up to the Minute Tips on Installing
and Finishing Antique Woods’ and ‘Manufacturer’s
Guidelines’ attached here.
While a reclaimed wood floor may seem more costly given the
expense involved in recovery and manufacturing Antique Heart
Pine, the wood will last for centuries. Prices vary widely
depending upon grade and may range from less than $5.00 to
over $20.00. We recommend that you or your building professional
use the terminology provided by the Reclaimed Wood Floor Association
when you specify the grade you want for your project. Get
your grade in writing to guarantee that you get what you specified.
Why Should You Use Antique Heart Pine?
Why should you use reclaimed woods… they are not only
rare and beautiful, but are durable, hard, ‘green’
and offer a tremendous diversity in designs. Antique Heart
Pine is shown here along with Antique Heart Cypress. Other
reclaimed woods that the Association will define include:
Oak, Chestnut, Redwood, Heart Cypress and Douglas Fir.
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