concerned, no injustice is done. It is one of the best hickories in the
quality of its wood, and also as an ornamental tree. It is likewise
abundant in many parts of its range, which extends from Maine to Kansas,
Texas, Florida, and throughout most of the territory enclosed by the
boundary lines thus delimited.
The name pignut is common in New England, New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky,
Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and
Minnesota; bitternut in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin; black
hickory in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and
Indiana; broom hickory in Missouri; brown hickory in Mississippi,
Delaware, Texas, Tennessee, Minnesota; hardshell in West Virginia; red
hickory in Delaware; switch bud hickory in Alabama; and white hickory in
New Hampshire and Iowa.
The nuts are generally bitter, but some trees bear fruit which is not
very offensive to the taste. The avidity with which swine feed upon it
gives the common name. This tree is doubtless confused many times with
bitternut, though their differences are enough to distinguish them
readily if they grow side by side. As far as the woods of the two
species are concerned, there is little occasion to keep them separate.
The pignut is a forked tree more frequently than any other species of
hickory; and the nuts vary in shape and size more than those of any
other. The tree is more remarkable for its variations than for its
regularity. In one thing, however, it is pretty constant: the limbs and
branches are smooth and clean, hence the botanical name _glabra_. As a
name for this tree, smooth hickory would be preferable to pignut. Trunks
attain a height of eighty or ninety feet and a diameter of three or
four, but the extreme sizes are rare. The largest specimens are found in
the lower Ohio valley, and the species is most common in Missouri and
Arkansas. It grows farther south and farther west than any other hickory
except pecan. Its southern limit is in Florida and its western in Texas.
The uses of hickory fall into general classes. More is manufactured into
vehicles than into any other single class of commodities, but not more
than into all other articles combined. The second largest users of
hickory are the manufacturers of handles. The third largest demand comes
from makers of agricultural implements and farm tools. Large amounts
are required for athletic goods, meat smoking, and various miscellaneous
purposes. The total amount used yearly in this country, and exported to
foreign countries, is not accurately known, but it probably exceeds
500,000,000 feet, board measure. About half of this passes through
sawmills in the usual manner, and the other half goes directly from the
forest to the factory or to the consumer.
The superiority of American buggies, sulkies, and other light vehicles
is due to the hickory in their construction. No other wood equals this
in combination of desirable physical properties. Though heavy, it is so
strong, tough, and resilient that small amounts suffice, and the weight
of the vehicle can be reduced to a lower point, without sacrificing
efficiency, than when any other wood is employed. It is preëminently a
wood for light vehicles. Oak, ash, maple, and elm answer well enough for
heavy wagons where strength is more essential than toughness and
elasticity. Hickory is suitable for practically all wooden parts of
light vehicles except the body. The slender spokes look like frail
dowels, and seem unable to maintain the load, but appearances are
deceptive. The bent rims are likewise very slender, but they last better
than steel. The shafts and poles with which carriages and carts are
equipped will stand severe strains and twists without starting a
splinter. The manufacturing of the stock is little less than a fine art.
In scarcely any other wood-using industry--probably excepting the making
of handles--is the grain so closely watched. Hickory users generally
speak of the annual growth rings as the grain. The grain must run
straight in spokes, rims, shafts, and poles. If the grain crosses the
stick, a break may occur by the simple process of splitting, and the
hickory in that case is no more dependable than many other woods.
Handle makers observe the same rule, and must have straight grain. The
more slender the handle, the more strictly the rule must be followed. A
cross grained golf club handle would fail at the first stroke. An ax
handle, if it has cross grain, will last a little longer, but it will
speedily split. Many of the best slender handles are of split hickory.
The line of cleavage follows the grain, but a saw does not always do so.
Heavy handles, like those for picks and sledges, are not so strictly
straight grained, because they are made strong enough to stand much more
strain than is ever likely to be put on them. Red heartwood is
frequently used in handles of that kind. Peavey and canthook handles are
generally split from billets, because the grain must be straight. Though
they are among the largest and heaviest of handles, breakage must be
guarded against with extra care, for the snap of a peavey handle at a
critical moment might cost the operator his life by precipitating a
skidway of logs upon him.
The hickory which goes into agricultural implements fills many places,
among the most important being connecting rods. It is often made into
springs to take up or check oscillation. It is used for that purpose as
picker sticks in textile mills.
Furniture makers could get along without hickory, and they do not need
much. It is oftenest seen in dowels, slender spindles, and the rungs of
chairs. The makers of sporting and athletic goods bend it for rackets,
hoops, and rims, or make vaulting poles, bats, or trapezes.
SHELLBARK HICKORY (_Hicoria laciniosa_) is often mistaken for shagbark.
The ranges of the two species coincide in part only. Shagbark grows
farther east, north and south than shellbark. The latter occupies an
island, as it were, inside the shagbark’s range. Shellbark is found from
central New York and eastern Pennsylvania, westward to Kansas, and
southward to North Carolina and middle Tennessee. The species is at its
best in the lower Ohio valley and in Missouri. The largest trees are 120
feet high and three in diameter, and are often free from branches half
or two-thirds of the length. The species prefers rich, deep bottom
lands, and does not suffer from occasional inundation from overflowing
rivers. The average tree is not quite as large as shagbark. The leaves
are larger than those of any other hickory, ranging in length from
fifteen to twenty-two inches. There are from five to nine leaflets,
usually seven. The upper ones are largest, and may be eight or nine
inches long and four or five wide. In the autumn the leaflets drop from
the petioles which adhere to the branches and furnish means of
identifying the tree in winter. The nuts including the hulls are as
large as small apples. When ripe, the hulls open and the nuts fall out;
but the hulls fall also. The nuts are as large as shagbark nuts, but the
two are seldom distinguished in market, though the shagbark’s are a
little richer in flavor. The bark’s roughness gives the tree its name.
Strips three or four feet long and five or six inches wide curl up at
the lower ends--sometimes at both ends--and adhere to the trunk several
years. The species has other names. It is known as big shellbark in
Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois,
and Kansas; bottom shellbark in Illinois; western shellbark or simply
shellbark in Rhode Island and Kentucky; thick shellbark in South
Carolina, Indiana, and Tennessee; kingnut in Tennessee.
The wood weighs 50.53 pounds per cubic foot, and is very hard, strong,
tough, and flexible. The heartwood is dark brown, the sapwood nearly
white. This hickory usually has less sapwood in proportion to heart than
other members of the species; but the wood is not kept separate from the
others when it goes to market, and its uses are as extensive as the
other hickories’. It is believed by some foresters that shellbark
hickory is worth cultivating for its nuts, as it is a vigorous bearer;
but little planting has been done. East of the Alleghanies, particularly
in Virginia, some planting has been carried out on old plantations for
ornamental purposes. On account of its long taproot, the tree is
difficult to transplant, and the nuts should be planted where the trees
are expected to remain.
[Illustration]
PECAN
[Illustration: PECAN]
PECAN
(_Hicoria Pecan_)
The name is pecan in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama,
Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and
Kansas; pecan nut and pecan tree in Louisiana. The name is of Indian
origin, and means walnut. The tree’s natural range is smaller than the
present area in which the tree is found, for it has been extensively
planted in recent years. It is found as far north as Iowa, south to
Texas, and east to Alabama and Kentucky. The highest development of the
wild tree is in the lower Ohio valley. Forest trees were once found
there which were said to be six feet in diameter and 170 high. Specimens
that large would be hard to find now.
The pecan is a hickory. As to wood, it is the poorest of the hickories,
and as to nuts it is the best. Its compound leaves are from twelve to
twenty inches long with from nine to seventeen leaflets. The latter are
from four to eight inches in length, and from one to three wide. The
first pairs on the petiole are smallest. The fruit grows in clusters of
from three to eleven, the number exceeding any other hickory. The nuts
are four-angled, and long for their width.
The wood of pecan has disappointed those who have attempted to use it
like other hickories. It does not differ much from them in appearance,
but it falls low in mechanical tests. In strength, toughness, and
stiffness it is inferior to the poorest of the other hickories. It has
less than half the strength and half the stiffness of shagbark hickory.
It is a fairly good fuel, but is high in ash.
The inferior quality of the wood has saved many a pecan tree from the
sawmill and the wagon shop. Fine trunks stand near public highways,
along river banks, and in fields, while all merchantable hickories of
other species have been sent to market. The uses of the wood are few. If
some of it goes to wagon shops or to factories where agricultural
vehicles are made, it is employed for parts which are not required to
endure strain or sustain sudden jars.
Fortunately it is a tree with a value of another kind. It is the most
important nut tree of the United States at this time, and it promises to
remain so. The forest-grown pecans were an article of food for Indians
who once lived in the region, and though white settlers who succeeded
the Indians as occupants of the land, depended less upon forest fruits
than the red men had done, yet the pecan was often of supreme importance
in the early years of settlement. The nuts have constituted an article
of commerce ever since the region had markets.
Nurserymen were not slow to recognize the value of the pecan tree for
planting purposes, and nursery grown stock has been on the market many
years. Extensive orchards have been planted in Texas, Louisiana,
Florida, and other southern states, and some of the earliest of these
orchards are now in bearing. However, by far the largest part of pecans
on the market is wild fruit from the forests. Many are shipped in from
Mexico, but most grow in the rich woods of southern states. They are
gathered like chestnuts in northern woods. The people who pick them sell
to local stores at low prices, often taking pay in merchandise. Buyers
collect the stock from country and village merchants, and put it on the
general market, often at three or four times the price paid to the
gatherers of the nuts.
One of the most important matters connected with pecan is the large
number of horticultural varieties which have been produced by
cultivation and selection. More than seventy have been listed in nursery
catalogues and special reports. Some of the nuts are twice the size of
those of the forest, and shells have been reduced in thinness until some
of them are really thinner than they should be to stand the rough usage
which comes to them in reaching markets.
Dealers occasionally polish pecans to impart the rich, brown color which
is supposed to give them the appearance of being fresh and of high
grade. The polishing is produced by friction, when the nuts in bulk are
shaken violently. Last year’s stock takes on as bright a polish as fresh
stock, and the color and smoothness alone are not sufficient to prove
that pecans are fresh from the trees.
The planted pecan tree grows rapidly and is as easily raised as fruit
trees. The wild tree is long-lived, and the cultivated varieties will
probably be like it.
NUTMEG HICKORY (_Hicoria myristicæformis_) is so named because the
nut has the size and the wrinkled surface of a nutmeg, though the
shape is different. The husk enclosing the nut is almost as thin as
paper. The only other name by which it is known is bitter waternut,
in Louisiana. The name scarcely applies, for the kernel is said not
to be bitter. The range of nutmeg hickory extends from the coast of
South Carolina to Arkansas. It is rather abundant in Arkansas, but
scarce in most other parts of its range. The tree has several
interesting features. It was partly discovered a long time before
the discovery was complete. In 1802 Andre F. Michaux saw the nut and
to that extent the species was discovered, but many years passed
before a full description was given to the world by a competent
botanist. The wood rates among the strongest and stiffest of all the
hickories, according to present information; but the calculations
were based on too few tests to be considered final. Two samples of
wood procured near Bonneau’s depot, South Carolina, by W. H.
Revenel, showed the remarkable breaking strength of 19,822 pounds
per square inch, and the measure of stiffness exceeded 2,000,000
pounds to the square inch. That strength is sixteen per cent above
shagbark. The weight of nutmeg hickory is 46.96 pounds to the cubic
foot. The wood is hard, tough, and compact. The structure, including
pores, medullary rays, annual rings, springwood and summerwood, is
similar to the wood of other hickories. Trees grow best in sandy
soil but near swamps and rivers where there is plenty of water. The
largest trunks are eighty or one hundred feet in height and two in
diameter. When use is made of this hickory it serves the same
purposes as the wood of other trees of the group. It is never
reported separately in statistics of wood utilization. It is too
scarce to be important as a timber tree. It apparently has a future
as an ornament, though it has not yet been widely planted. It has
proved a success in the Carolinas and it thrives in the climate of
Washington, D. C. The luster of its foliage makes it the most
beautiful of the hickories. In common with other members of the
genus, its long taproot renders the transplanting of nursery stock
difficult.
WATER HICKORY (_Hicoria aquatica_) is known as swamp hickory in
South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana; bitter pecan in
Mississippi and Louisiana, and water bitternut in Tennessee and
South Carolina. The northern limit of this species is in Virginia
near Mobjack bay, the southern limit in the Caloosa valley, Florida,
west to the Brazos river, Texas, and north to southern Illinois. The
wood is hard, heavy, strong, but rather brittle; the sapwood is
thick and often is nearly white, while the heartwood is dark brown.
It is the most porous of the hickories, and the pores are
distributed generally through the annual rings of growth. In other
hickories they are largely restricted to the inner part of each
ring, though a few are dispersed through all parts. In swamp hickory
there is little difference in appearance between the wood grown
early in the season and that produced later. The tree is a rapid
grower. It is an inhabitant of deep swamps, and if the land is
inundated a considerable part of the year, the tree seems to grow
all the better. At its best it may attain a height of 100 feet, and
a diameter of two, but that size is unusual. The nut is small and
wrinkled, and when broken open, pockets of red bitter powder are
frequently found inside the shell. Usually the nuts are too bitter
to be eaten, but it is said that near the western limit of the
tree’s range, nuts are sometimes edible.
The only reported uses for the wood are fuel and fencing. It is poor
fence material, because, like other hickories, it decays in a short
time when exposed to weather. The wood of this genus is rich in
foods on which decay-producing fungi feed. Fungus is a low order of
plant life which sends its hair-like threads into the wood cells and
consumes the material found there; but numerous insects bore into
wood to procure food. Few woods suffer from such attacks more than
hickory. Even after it is seasoned and manufactured into
commodities, it is frequently attacked by various species of powder
post beetles, and much injury results. Water hickory while yet
standing is often greatly damaged by the larvæ of certain moths
which find their way into the soft wood just under the bark and
tunnel minute galleries which subsequently fill with brown
substance. According to R. B. Hough, these brown streaks in water
hickory are hard enough to turn the edge of steel tools. They not
only damage the structure of the wood but spoil its appearance.
BITTER PECAN (_Hicoria texana_) is a Texas species which has not
been reported elsewhere. The average size of the tree is from
fifteen to twenty-five feet in height and eight to ten inches in
diameter; but in rich bottom land, particularly along the Brazos
river, specimens sometimes attain a diameter of three feet and a
height of 100. The leaves are from ten to twelve inches in length,
with from seven to eleven leaflets. The nuts are very bitter, but
are of approximately the same size and shape as edible pecans. The
shells are thin and very brittle. The tree’s range extends inland
100 or 150 miles from the Texas coast.
NORTH CAROLINA SHAGBARK HICKORY (_Hicoria carolinæ-septentrionalis_)
is found in the neighboring parts of the four states: North
Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. In the best land this
tree is occasionally eighty feet high and two or three in diameter,
but when it occurs on dry hillsides its average height is twenty or
thirty feet, and its diameter about a foot. The compound leaves are
from four to eight inches long, with usually three, but occasionally
five leaflets. The sweet nuts are small and brown. The bark
separates into thick strips a foot or more in length and three or
four inches wide. The rough trunk resembles the northern shagbark
hickory. The wood is very tough, strong, and hard, the heart light
reddish-brown, the thin sapwood nearly white. It is not
distinguished from the other hickories in commerce, and it has the
same uses when any use is made of it.
[Illustration]
WHITE ELM
[Illustration: WHITE ELM]
WHITE ELM
(_Ulmus Americana_)
Six species of elm occur in the United States, not counting the planer
tree as an elm, though lumbermen usually consider it as such.[5] The
white elm is the most common, is distributed most widely, and is
commercially the most important. More of it is used as lumber, slack
cooperage, and other forms of forest products, than all other elms of
this country combined. The statistics of sawmill output collected
annually by the United States census are not compiled in a way to show
the elms separately. All go in as one. The annual lumber cut of elm in
the whole country is about 265,000,000 feet, distributed over
thirty-four states, with Wisconsin leading, followed in the order named
by Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, New York, and Minnesota.
In addition to lumber, elm furnishes about 130,000,000 slack cooperage
staves yearly.
[5] The elms are white elm (_Ulmus americana_), cork elm (_Ulmus
racemosa_), slippery elm (_Ulmus pubescens_), cedar elm (_Ulmus
crassifolia_), wing elm (_Ulmus alata_), and red elm (_Ulmus
serotina_). They are all confined to the region east of the Rocky
Mountains.
The elms, taken as a class, are much alike. There is more resemblance
between the species than between species of oaks or pines, yet some
difference exists between elms. This holds not only between different
species, but between individuals of the same species. Climate,
situation, and soil have much to do with the character of the wood of
the same species. So great is the difference at times that fairly good
judges of timber are deceived as to the species. A tree growing on dry,
rocky soil produces wood quite different from one on rich, deep,
well-watered soil. Not only is the wood of one different from that of
the other, but the appearances of the standing trees are not alike. The
differences may not show in leaves, flowers, and fruit as much as in the
shapes and sizes of trees, and the habit of the branches.
White elm is by common consent the type of the genus, the standard by
which the other species are measured. It is proper to compare certain
properties and characters of other elms with white elm, in order that a
general view of all may be had. The dry weights, per cubic foot, of wood
are as follows: White elm 40.54 pounds, slippery elm 43.35, cedar elm
45.15, cork elm 45.26, and wing elm 46.69. Figures which show the weight
of the southern red elm (_Ulmus serotina_) are not available. White elm
is thus shown to be lightest of the group.
Its breaking strength averages 12,158 pounds per cubic inch, under the
usual tests by which the strength of woods is determined. Reduced to
everyday language that means that 12,158 pounds would just break a white
elm stick, 2⅝ inches square, and resting on supports twelve inches
apart. That is the meaning of “breaking strength,” or “modulus of
rupture,” as the term is used in engineering text books relating to
woods. The following figures for the breaking strength of other elms
make comparisons with white elm easy: Cedar elm 11,000; wing elm 11,162;
slippery elm 12,342; cork elm (often called rock elm) 15,172. It is
shown that two elms are stronger and two weaker than white elm. This
wood rates very little below white oak in strength.
The different species of elms vary considerably in stiffness, or the
ability to spring back when bent. This factor is expressed by engineers
in high figures, is purely technical, and is based on a wood’s ability
to stretch and regain its former position. The only service which the
figures can render to the layman is to furnish a basis for comparing one
wood with another. The stiffer a wood, the greater its resistance to an
effort to stretch it lengthwise. White elm’s measure of stiffness
(modulus of elasticity) is 1,070,000 pounds per square inch; wing elm
853,000; cedar elm 981,000; slippery elm 1,318,000; cork elm 1,512,000.
It is shown here, as was shown in the figures representing the strength
of the elms, that two species rate above and two below white elm in
stiffness.