northward in the Mississippi valley to southern Illinois, and westward
to Arkansas and Texas. It prefers swamps and attains largest size in low
ground which is subject to frequent overflow. The tree will stand in
several feet of water the greater part of the year without injury. It is
closely associated with cypress, the planer tree, and other species
which grow in deep swamps.
Tupelo has not figured much in tree literature outside the books of
botanists. Travelers and local writers have paid it little attention. It
has not been remarkable for anything in the past, and has escaped
observation to a large extent because it grows in swamps and along
bayous, remote from the usual routes of travel. Its flowers attracted no
attention, its fruit was worthless, and the early settlers did not put
themselves to trouble to procure the wood for any purpose. That was the
situation from the early settlement of the country where this species is
found up to a very recent period when economic conditions began to bring
tupelo into notice.
It first attracted attention in the markets as a substitute for yellow
poplar. That was brought about by an attempt to pass it as poplar. The
growing scarcity of that wood in the region about Chesapeake bay led to
the trial of tupelo. It was sold as bay poplar, and the purchaser was
left to infer that it was poplar cut in the region tributary to
Chesapeake bay. Probably few buyers were deceived, but they found the
wood a fair substitute for the yellow poplar which they had been
purchasing in the Baltimore and Norfolk markets. It is known as bay
poplar yet in many localities. It goes to England as such. One of its
most important uses in that country is as casing for electric wire
fittings. It has, however, many other important uses in England and on
the continent. It is claimed that it may be stained to imitate
Circassian walnut in the manufacture of furniture. This is possible, but
most probably tupelo has been confused with red gum which is a
well-known substitute for Circassian walnut.
Tupelo trees attain a height from seventy to a hundred feet, and a
diameter of two to four feet above the swelled base. The general
appearance of the bark suggests both yellow poplar and red gum. Trees
have a habit of forking near the tops. The leaves are five or seven
inches long, sometimes with smooth margins, and often with a few sharp
points. Flowers appear in March and April, and fruit ripens early in
Autumn. It is a dark purple, tough-skinned drupe, about an inch long.
The wood weighs 32.37 pounds per cubic foot. It is soft, and has about
three-fourths the strength and little more than half the stiffness of
white oak. It is not well suited to places where strength and rigidity
are required. The fibers are interwoven, making the wood difficult to
split. The heart is brown, often nearly white; the sapwood is very
thick; and the annual rings are not clearly defined, because of the
similarity between the springwood and summerwood. The pores are small
but numerous, and are scattered evenly through the whole annual ring.
The wood of roots differs from that of the trunk more than is usual with
hardwoods. It is very light, and has been long employed in the South as
a substitute for cork as floats for fish nets.
Tupelo is often logged with cypress. The two trees grow in close
association in deep swamps. The butt cuts of tupelo are so heavy that
they float deep, or even go to the bottom. It was formerly customary,
and still is to some extent, to girdle trees whose trunks were to be
floated to the mills. In the course of one season the standing trees dry
sufficiently for the logs to float. At other times, trees are cut green,
the logs are skidded and allowed to dry some months before they are
rafted or floated to the mills. The sapwood is liable to decay, even in
the brief period while the logs are on the skids. The wood may be
protected against decay to some extent by smearing the ends of the logs
with tar or some other substance which prevents the spores of
decay-producing fungus from entering.
The seasoning of tupelo was formerly a problem exceedingly vexatious to
the lumberman. The wood is full of water, and warping was one of the
troubles which was constantly encountered. Finally experience gained the
mastery, and seasoning troubles are fewer now. Shrinkage of four or five
per cent is not unusual in passing lumber from the green to dry state.
Tupelo is like hickory in one respect--factories use more wood than the
sawmills cut. The shops and manufacturing plants of ten states use as
much tupelo as is cut by all the sawmills in the United States. These
states are Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan,
Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas. The reason for factory
use exceeding the sawmill cut is that much reaches factories, in the
form of veneer, which does not pass through a sawmill. The lumber output
of most of the timber trees of this country is from one-third to
one-half greater than the factory use. The difference represents the
rough lumber used, and which never goes to a factory.
Tupelo lately entered the general market, but the yearly demand now
exceeds 100,000,000 feet. Its uses range from boxes and cheap handles to
interior finish and material for musical instruments. It is particularly
liked for containers for berries and small fruits, on their way to
market. Its whiteness and clean appearance fit it for that use.
Higher grades of shipping boxes are also made. Wholesale grocers order
largely of this wood for spice, coffee, and tea boxes. These commodities
are exacting in their requirements because their odor, which is often
regarded as the criterion of their value, must not be impaired. A wood
with an odor of its own is immediately ruled out. Cigar box makers use
tupelo, sometimes as thin lumber for the whole box, but usually as
backing over which to lay a thin veneer of Spanish cedar. Plug tobacco
boxes are also made of tupelo.
In Illinois and Michigan tupelo is listed among woods manufactured into
pianos, organs, mandolins, and guitars. In Maryland they make scows and
barges of it. In Arkansas and Louisiana it is worked into excelsior and
slack cooperage stock. It is a favorite wood in Mississippi for pumplogs
and broom handles. Its leading reported use in Texas is for porch
columns. In Missouri it is manufactured into laundry appliances, such as
washboards, clothes racks, and ironing boards. In nearly all
manufacturing centers of the country it is made into furniture and
interior finish. It is frequently substituted for yellow poplar in
panels, not only in furniture and cabinet work, but in carriage bodies.
The supply of tupelo in southern forests is fairly large, and will meet
demand for some years, but it is a tree of slow growth, and when present
stands are cut, a new supply will probably never come.
SOUR TUPELO (_Nyssa ogeche_) appears to be the only member of the
gum group whose fruit is of any value to man, and it is not very
important. The large, dull red drupes ripen in July and August, and
sometimes hang on the trees until late fall, allowing ample time for
gathering them. They are very sour, for which reason the tree is
called sour gum. The fruit is put through a pickling process which
renders it palatable and it is not an infrequent article on southern
pantry shelves. The range of the tree is confined to the region near
the coast from the southern border of South Carolina, through the
Ogeechee river valley in Georgia, to northern and western Florida.
The botanical name refers to the river along whose course the trees
are most abundant. Local names are gopher plum, Ogeechee lime, and
wild lime. The tree is sixty or seventy feet high, one or two in
diameter, and is often divided in several stems. Its wood is
lightest of the gums, weighing only 28.75 pounds per cubic foot. It
is diffuse-porous, and the springwood is scarcely distinguishable
from the summerwood. The annual rings of growth are indistinct, and
the medullary rays are thin and inconspicuous. The wood is weak,
soft, tough, and white, and little difference is apparent between
heart and sapwood. The flowers are rich in honey and are valuable to
bee keepers. It appears that no reports exist of the use of this
wood for any purpose. It is not abundant anywhere.
WATER GUM (_Nyssa biflora_) is a member of the gum group, and is of
small importance. Trees above thirty feet high are unusual, and the
trunk is of poor form, owing to its greatly enlarged base. This gum
is found on the margins of small ponds in the pine barrens from
North Carolina to the Gulf coast. The leaves turn purple and red in
the fall, and are then conspicuous objects. The fruit is a blue
drupe about a third of an inch long. The wood is light, tough, and
difficult to split.
[Illustration]
BLACK WALNUT
[Illustration: BLACK WALNUT]
BLACK WALNUT
(_Juglans Nigra_)
This tree has few names. It is called walnut, black walnut, and
walnut-tree. The color of the wood and bark is responsible for the word
black in the name, though some people use the adjective to distinguish
the tree from butternut which is often known as white walnut. The
natural range of black walnut covers 600,000 or 700,000 square miles,
and it has been extended by planting. Its northern limit stretches from
New York to Minnesota, its southern from Florida to Texas. It is
difficult to say where the species found its highest development in the
primeval forests, for very large trees were reported in New York, among
the southern Appalachian mountains, in the Ohio valley, and beyond the
Mississippi in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. The wood cut in
Ohio and Indiana has been of greater commercial importance than that
from any other portion of its range, but that has been due, in part, to
the fact that it came into market before the best of the forest growth
had been destroyed in those states, and instead of burning it or mauling
it into rails, as eastern farmers did in early times, the farmers of the
Ohio valley sold their walnut. Early in the history of black walnut
lumbering, Indiana and Ohio came to the front as the most important
sources of supply, and they still hold that position, notwithstanding
the original forests of those states were supposed to be nearly
exhausted long ago. The states cutting most black walnut in 1910, in the
order named, were Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Missouri, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Iowa.
During the period from 1860 to 1880 black walnut was in much demand for
furniture, and the largest yearly cut was 125,000,000 feet. It was
during that period of twenty years that operators pushed into all of the
out-of-the-way places in search of the timber. Logs were hauled on
wagons long distances to bring them out of remote valleys and slopes
where no timber buyer had ever gone before. The walnut buyers made such
a thorough canvas of the country that it was generally supposed no
merchantable tree from Kansas to Virginia would escape. Many a dooryard
giant whose wide branches had shaded the family roof for generations,
fell before the ax of the contractor who was willing to pay fifty
dollars for a single trunk, though it might be twenty miles from the
nearest railroad or navigable stream. In spite of the thoroughness of
the search, many a walnut tree was spared. Logs have been going to
market ever since, and still they go. They will continue to go for
years, generations, and centuries; for walnut trees grow with rapidity.
The trunk’s value increases with age. The dark colored heartwood only is
merchantable, and young trees have little heartwood. The thick, white
sap constitutes most of the trunk until long after the tree has reached
small sawlog size. Then the transformation to the dark, valuable
heartwood goes on with fair rapidity, and the outer shell of sapwood
becomes thinner as the heart increases, and in time a trunk is produced
which is fit for good logs. Value comes only with age. The quarter or
half a century which has passed since the country was so diligently
ransacked for merchantable walnut, has been sufficient to develop many a
tree which was then rejected by the purchasers. Many a tree now a foot
in diameter had scarcely sprouted then. In a region of 700,000 square
miles, walnut trees do not need to grow very close together to produce a
yearly cut of 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 feet.
Black walnut is valuable for its color, figure, and the fine polish it
takes. It is stronger than white oak, weight for weight, but it is eight
pounds lighter per cubic foot. The figure of the wood is due wholly to
the annual rings, as its medullary rays are invisible to the naked eye.
The wood is very porous, and the pores are diffused in all parts of the
annual rings, except in the thin, pencil-like mark representing the
outward boundary of the summerwood. When sapwood changes to heartwood,
some of the pores disappear, but those which remain are abundantly
sufficient to absorb any stains or fillers which the wood finisher may
wish to apply.
The annual sawmill cut of black walnut in the United States is from
35,000,000 to 40,000,000 feet, but much goes to foreign countries in the
log, and a considerable quantity goes to veneer mills--about 2,500,000
feet a year--and a quantity finds its way to various factories where it
is worked up without any statistical record being made of it.
Black walnut is never used as rough lumber. It all goes to factories of
some kind to be converted into finished commodities. It is not possible
to say where it all goes, for statistics of manufacture are fragmentary
in this country. It may be of interest to know that demand for walnut by
factories in the following states was 11,641,137 feet in 1910: Alabama,
Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, North
Carolina, and Texas. The wood served so many purposes that a list of
them would be monotonous. In Illinois the largest users are the sewing
machine and the musical instrument industries; in Michigan the makers of
automobiles and of musical instruments; in Kentucky the manufacturers of
coffins, furniture, and musical instruments; in Massachusetts, the
makers of furniture and of firearms. These uses probably afford a fairly
accurate index for the whole country. During the Civil war the largest
demand for walnut came from gunstock makers. Doubtless the largest use
from 1865 to 1885 was for furniture.
Much of the best black walnut is exported. The logs are flattened on the
four sides to make them fit better in ships and cars, and also to be rid
of most of the sapwood which is valueless. The ends are painted with red
lead or some other substance to lessen liability to check. Sometimes
export walnut is sawed in thick planks.
Large quantities of old-time walnut furniture have been resurrected in
recent years from granary and garret where it was stored long ago to
have it out of the way. Some of the old beds, lounges, cupboards, and
chairs were of heavy, solid walnut, the kind not made now. Some of it
has been furbished, re-upholstered, and set among the heirlooms; other
pieces have been sold to furniture makers who saw the solid wood in
veneers, and use it again.
The search for old walnut did not stop with dragging antique furniture
from cubbyholes and attics, but two-inch lumber has been pulled from
floors of old barns, and mills. Many old fence rails were made into gun
stocks during the Civil war. Later, walnut stumps were pulled from field
and wayside, and went to veneer mills. Some finely figured wood comes
from stumps where roots and trunk join.
An occasional walnut tree develops a large burl which is valued for its
figured wood. Sometimes the burl is the form of a door knob, with the
tree trunk growing through the center. The burl sometimes has a diameter
three or four times as great as the trunk. The origin of such burls is
supposed to be a mass of buds which fail to break through the bark.
Black walnut has a compound leaf from one to two feet long, with from
fifteen to twenty-three leaflets, each about three inches long and an
inch or two wide. The nuts ripen in the fall, and are valuable. They are
borne chiefly by trees growing in open ground; forest trees do not bear
until old, and then only a few nuts. The walnuts which germinate are
usually those buried by squirrels, and forgotten.
Within the past twenty or thirty years plantations have been made in
states of the Middle West. Many young planted trees have been cut for
fence posts, with disappointing results. It was known that old walnut is
durable, and it was supposed young trunks would be, when used for posts;
but young trees are nearly all sapwood which rots quickly.
Forest grown walnut trees vary in size from a diameter of two feet and a
height of fifty, to a diameter of six or more and a height of 100 or
120. Trunks which grow in the shade are tall, clear, and symmetrical;
those in the open are shorter, with more taper.
PALE-LEAF HICKORY (_Hicoria villosa_) is a small tree but large
enough to be useful wherever it exists in sufficient quantity. The
largest specimens attain a height of fifty feet and a diameter of
eighteen inches. The tree bears nuts when very small, and the kernel
is sweet. The bark of this hickory is rough but not shaggy. The
range extends from New Jersey to Florida and west to Missouri and
Texas. It is most abundant in the lower Appalachian ranges. The wood
possesses the common characteristics of the hickories, and it is cut
with them wherever it is found, but is seldom or never reported
separately in lumber operations.
SMALL PIGNUT HICKORY (_Hicoria odorata_) is considered a species by
some botanists while others regard it as a variety. It is called
small pignut in Maryland, and occasionally little shagbark. This
last name refers to the roughness of the bark which resembles the
bark of elm. The range of the tree extends from Massachusetts to
Missouri and south to the Ohio and the Potomac rivers. The wood
differs little from that of pignut hickory, and the uses are the
same. No distinction is made between them at the shop and factory.
This tree is by some botanists believed to be a hybrid between
shagbark and pignut. It is sometimes called false shagbark. The nut
is edible.
[Illustration]
BUTTERNUT
[Illustration: BUTTERNUT]
BUTTERNUT
(_Juglans Cinerea_)
This tree is known as butternut or as white walnut in all parts of its
range. Butternut is in reference to the oily kernel of the nuts, and
white walnut is the name given by those who would distinguish the tree
from black walnut. Persons acquainted with one of the species in its
native woods are usually sure to be acquainted with the other, for their
ranges are practically co-extensive, except that black walnut extends
farther southwest, butternut farther northeast. Butternut grows from New
Brunswick to South Dakota, from Delaware to Arkansas, and along the
Appalachian highlands to northern Georgia and Alabama.
Butternut resembles black walnut in a good many ways and differs from it
in several. They are very closely related botanically--as closely as are
brothers in the same household. Black walnut is larger, stronger, better
known, and has always dominated and eclipsed the other in usefulness and
public esteem; yet butternut is a tree both useful and interesting. No
person acquainted with both would ever mistake one for the other, winter
or summer. Botanists tell how to distinguish butternut from black walnut
by noting minor differences. The person who is not a botanist needs no
such help. He knows them at sight, and there is no possibility of
mistaking them.
Butternut in the forest may attain a height of eighty or 100 feet, and a
diameter of three, but few persons ever see a specimen of that size, and
never in open ground. In shade, the butternut does its best to get its
crown up to light and sunshine, but it is weak. It often gives up the
struggle and remains in the shade of trees which overtop it. In that
situation its crown is small, thin, and appears to rest lightly in the
form of a small bunch of yellowish-green leaves on the top of a tall,
spindling bole, which is seldom straight, but is made up of slight,
undulating curves. The pale, yellowish tinge of the bark suggests a
plant deprived of sunshine.
When butternut grows in open ground where light falls upon its crown and
on all sides, it assumes a different form and presents another figure.
The trunk is nearly as short as that of an apple tree. It divides in
large branches and limbs, and these spread wide; leaves are healthy, yet
the crown of a butternut always looks thin compared with that of the
black walnut. Tests show that butternut wood, when thoroughly dry, is
somewhat stiffer than black walnut; but it is light and weak. It is
about two-thirds as heavy and two-thirds as strong as black walnut. The
growing tree betrays the wood’s weakness. Large limbs snap in storms.
Trees become lopsided, and a symmetrical, well-proportioned butternut
crown is an exception. The broken branches leave openings for the
entrance of decay, and butternuts nearly always die of disease rather
than of old age.
Leaves are compound, and from fifteen to thirty inches in length. Few
trees of this country have larger leaves. There are from eleven to
seventeen leaflets. They are hairy and sticky. Hands that handle them
are covered with mucilage-like substance. The nuts, which grow in
clusters of three or five, are of the same color as the leaves and
covered with the same sticky fuzz. The nuts are two inches or more in
length, and are borne abundantly when trees stand in open ground. Size
rather than age appears to determine the period when trees commence to
bear. Those of extra vigor produce when ten or twelve years old. The
nuts are salable in the market. They fall with the leaves, immediately
after the first sharp frost, and all come down together. A single day
frequently suffices to strip the last leaf from a tree, though some of
the nuts may hang a little longer. The kernels are very rich, when the
nuts are dry, and are apt to cloy the appetite; but they are improved by
freezing where they lie on the ground among the leaves; but they must be
used quickly after they thaw, or they will spoil. Nuts nearly full-grown
but not yet hard are made into pickles, but the fuzz must first be
washed off with hot water.
Butternut bark has played a rather important role in the country’s
affairs. Doctors in the Revolutionary war made much of their medicine of
the roots and bark of this tree. Drugs were unattainable, and physicians
were forced to betake themselves to the woods for substitutes, and their
pharmacopoeias were enriched by the butternut tree. Housewives dyed
cloth a brown color with this bark long before aniline dyes found their
way into this country. Whole companies of Confederate soldiers from the
mountain regions in the Civil war wore clothes dyed in decoctions of
butternut bark, and popularly known as “butternut jeans.”
The annual output of butternut lumber is placed at a little more than
1,000,000 feet a year. It is widely used, but in small amounts. In
Maryland it is made into ceiling and flooring; in North Carolina into
cabinet work, fixtures for stores and offices, and into furniture; in
Michigan its reported uses are boat finish, interior finish for houses,
molding, and screen frames. In Illinois it is used for all the purposes
listed above and also for church altars and car finish. These uses are
doubtless typical, and hold good in all parts of the country where any
use is made of butternut.
The wood has figure similar to that of black walnut, but the color is
lighter. It is nearer brown than black. The pores are diffused through
the annual ring, but are more numerous and of larger size in the inner
than in the outer part. The springwood blends gradually with the wood of
the latter part of the season, without sharp distinction, but the ring
terminates in a black line which is the chief element of contrast in the
wood’s figure.
The future value of butternut will be less in the lumber than in the
nuts. The tendency in that direction is now apparent. When land is
cleared, the trees which would formerly have gone to the sawmill, are
now left to bear nuts. The averaged price paid by factories in North
Carolina for butternut is $40 a thousand feet. It is cheaper in the Lake
States.