Home Page Music Writings Jackie Hall
Disclaimer: All images are taken from North
Carolina
State University , who have been good enough to post Romeyn B.
Hough's
The American Woods, an unbelievably cool work that you can't
buy, but
that every woodworker should see. What is it? I quote from
the
site: "Radial, tangential, and cross-sections of 350 North
American woods from the 14-volume rare book The American Woods,
published between 1888 and 1910 by the author, Romeyn Beck Hough. The
images can be accessed by volume number or by the scientific or common
name of each tree."
I can't thank them enough for making this work available to the public.
As I've mentioned before, I build guitars for fun, and used to do it for a living. As a result, I'm kind of a wood fan.
America has some great woods - in fact, about the only thing we lack is a native rosewood, although mesquite is close enough for the purposes of the guitarmaker. Mesquite looks like this:
Damn, that is pretty. "Radial Section" is the cut a guitar builder should use, unless it's for ornamental purposes only.
Manzanita works well as a rosewood substitute too, but unfortunately for the woodworker, it is endangered and can't be harvested. But look at this, and imagine a time when you could get this stuff in a useful size. We won't see that again in my lifetime, sadly:
I'm dying here, that stuff is GORGEOUS! Damn our greedy ancestors!
We also don't possess a native mahogany, although both cherry and madrone work very nicely as a substitute.
I mention all this by way of bringing up that America has some very famous woods: maple and oak being the two most well known.
There used to be a third tree in that group as well.
Until the 1900's, chestnut would have been in that group as well. In fact, seeing as it was a source of great wood and a food source (I've had roasted chestnuts - divine!), it would have been at the very top of the list. But in 1904 everything changed.
In one of the first examples of just how destructive an invasive species can be, a fungus (Cryphonectria parasitica) that came in on Japanese chestnut trees (Castanea crenata) imported in 1876, started killing American chestnut trees (Castanea dentata).
The American chestnut:
Like oak, but whiter and "stripeier". Stunning.
By 1950, the species was essentially wiped out. 9 million acres of forest, gone. And American trees are not resistant, and couldn't develop resistance as the disease kills the trees before they reach sexual maturity. The Asian trees get the fungus as well but don't die from it; they are resistant.
A less virulent strain successfully induces a form of resistance in the tree, but sadly, the disease scars the tree so the timber is useless.
Chestnut wood is great. Durable as oak, it has an advantange over that wonderful wood in that it is lighter (oak is horribly heavy, my oak desk weighs about 400 pounds) and it is easier to work - oak is hard and dulls tools quickly. Chestnut is particularly well suited for flooring and furniture.
As it turns out, American chestnut is not completely gone. Which brings me to a story posted today by the AP:
ALBANY, Ga. - A stand of American chestnut trees
that somehow escaped a blight that killed off nearly all their kind in
the early 1900s has been discovered along a hiking trail not far from
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Little White House at Warm
Springs.
The find has stirred excitement among those working to restore the
American chestnut, and raised hopes that scientists might be able to
use the pollen to breed hardier chestnut trees.
"There's something about this place that has allowed them to endure the
blight," said Nathan Klaus, a biologist with the Georgia Department of
Natural Resources who spotted the trees. "It's either that these trees
are able to resist the blight, which is unlikely, or Pine Mountain has
something unique that is giving these trees resistance."
Experts say it could be that the chestnuts have less competition from
other trees along the dry, rocky ridge. The fungus that causes the
blight thrives in a moist environment.
The largest of the half-dozen or so trees is about 40 feet tall and 20
to 30 years old, and is believed to be the southernmost American
chestnut discovered so far that is capable of flowering and producing
nuts.
"This is a terrific find," said David Keehn, president of the Georgia
chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation. "A tree of this size is
one in a million."
The rugged area known as Pine Mountain is at the southern end of the
Appalachians near Warm Springs, where Roosevelt built a home and sought
treatment after he was stricken with polio in 1921.
"FDR may have roasted some chestnuts on his fire for Christmas or
enjoyed their blooms in the spring," Klaus said.
The chestnut foundation may use pollen from the tree in a breeding
program aimed at restoring the population with blight-resistant trees.
"When the flowers are right, we're going to rush down and pollinate the
flowers, collect the seeds a few weeks later and collect the nuts,"
Klaus said. "If we ever find a genetic solution to the chestnut blight,
genes from that tree will find their way into those trees."
The chestnut foundation has been working for about 15 years to develop
a blight-resistant variety. The goal is to infuse the American chestnut
with the blight-resistant genes of the Chinese chestnut.
American chestnuts once made up about 25 percent of the forests in
the eastern United
States, with an estimated 4 billion trees from Maine to Mississippi
and Florida.
The trees helped satisfy demand for roasted chestnuts, and their
rot-resistant wood was used to make fence posts, utility poles, barns,
homes, furniture and musical instruments.
Then these magnificent hardwoods, which could grow to a height of 100
feet and a diameter of 8 feet or more, were almost entirely wiped out
by a fast-spreading fungus discovered in 1904.
I'd like to see this American icon bought back. I'm glad that these folks are doing the work they're doing, and wish them all the best. And if they succeed, I'll buy some wood.
Sources:
Info about chestnut blight: http://www.apsnet.org/online/feature/chestnut/
The AP story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060518/ap_on_sc/chestnut_discovery
The American Chestnut Society: http://www.acf.org/Chestnut_history.htm
State Library of North Carolina's History of Forestry site: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/specialcollections/forestry/index.html
The Hough book: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/specialcollections/forestry/hough/index.html
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