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Often times you need to understand the structure in order to understand the wood.  In the case of a cooling tower, the purpose of the structure is to cool the water vapor so it will condense and can once again be converted to steam to power the turbines.  The structure is designed to have as much
surface area as possible so that more water will condense.  The structure is extremely wood intensive and yet the pieces are all rather small for such a large structure.  I had never before seen a wood structure five stories tall with the largest wood member a nominal 4×4. Another first was the copper fasteners – every nail, screw, bolt and nut was copper.  Iron is cheaper but rusts out and with all the water condensing would fail relatively quickly. The result is a copper green patina on every single piece of this wood.
Cracking good.

Sizes: primarily 6/4 – 10/4.  Primarily 4-9″ wide and 8-12′ long.  
Applications: ideal for paneling.
Grade: primarily vertical grain, limited knots. No nail holes, very limited checking.
Defining characteristic: unusual coloration from exposure to copper enclosure: above average for heart pine.

 

WOOD SPECIES: The hardwoods Oak, Chestnut, Hickory, Beech, Elm, and the softwoods Hemlock, White Pine and Spruce.  

COMMON SIZES: 2-3” x 8-12” x 15’+ lumber up to 12 x 14” timbers.

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS: Weathered face, Hand-hewn, circular and band sawn textures. Faded paint and greyish brown colors. Bolt holes and irregular construction cuts.

GEOGRAPHY: Barns are common in many parts of the country, but our woods are sourced in the East,  primarily from Ohio, Pennsylvania and parts of New York and New England.  Traveling further south one begins to see more red oak than white oak and further north into Canada and northern New England one finds more softwoods, as well as beech and maple.  Although one occasionally finds oak in industrial structures, the majority of reclaimed white oak and most other hardwoods for that matter, come from barns.

CONSTRUCTION

As building type, Barns have been such an important part of America and agricultural history. Early on, they were essentially just architecture for animals, with one side for cattle and the other for horses. Eventually pigs, sheep, and goats moved in. Most barns were traditional timber frame, though the beams were often sawed in later years rather than hewn with an ax. Then barns were covered with vertical board siding. The construction was sturdy and large doors rolled on factory-made tracks. The later barns had more ornaments added, such as cupolas and mill work designs, and when freshly painted, were a striking sight, and endlessly photographed. Learn more

Barns take a real beating and the time tested construction is basically a framework of solid timbers with exterior barn siding which can be removed and replaced over time. The frames are often beautifully proportioned with simple lines that give the designs a charm and integrity that seems lost in much of todays pre-fab pole and metal constructions.
In the old days, it was traditional to have a barn raising party, with relatives and friends helping to build a barn, often in a few days. The Amish still do it today.

STYLES

“Here, in this small and magic box, 
The farmer crowds his fields and flocks; 
Arithmetic can never tell 
How one barn holds the farm so well.”
         – Ralph Seager, Penn Yan, NY poet

Barns come in all sizes and shapes, as the various styles serve different functions. The first great barns built in this country were those of the Dutch settlers of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in New York State. Relatively few Dutch barns survive in good condition or unaltered.

Some of the more common designs over time include Bank Barns, that were built into the side of a hill. Crib barns, popular in the South, and including multiple cribs or pens for cattle or pigs, with a hayloft above. Round Barns (George Washington owned one) in the Midwest, which had a greater volume-to-surface ratio than the rectangular, and required fewer materials. And the iconic Prairie Barn, with it’s peak roof above a hayloft, which was usually much larger than the other barns.

Barns can sometimes reflect ethnic traditions and local customs; along with changing farming practices, building techniques and technology. The Finnish log barns in Idaho, Czech and German-Russian barns in the Dakotas, and English barns in the northeast. Some are characterized by their use – dairy, tobacco, hop-drying, rice, etc. Others were just sold by Sears, Roebuck and Company or other mail-order firms. And some don’t fit into any category, but all are part of the country’s heritage.

And why are nine out of ten barns painted Red? One explanation is because most barns are very large, and red was the cheapest paint available. But the color sure matches the charm and romance that barns reflect.

FUNCTION AND DEVELOPMENTS

In the nineteenth century came a new era of farm construction, which accelerated after the Civil War, and brought on changes in barns with complex farm machinery, traditionally horse-drawn, and then steam-powered. Hay, for example, the single most bulky item stored in barns. The horse-drawn mower made greater amounts of hay than ever before, which could now be mechanically unloaded, and filled as high as the barn and hoisting apparatus could place it. This one new practice would make barns ever larger, allowing crops and animals to be housed under one roof.

The barns developed more efficient methods for everyday tasks like removing manure or piping water into the stalls, which saved work and improved the animals’ health and production. Lightning rods, too, helped reduce one fire hazard, and eventually farmers could buy fire insurance, either individually or as part of a cooperative. Electricity, plumbing and a hundred fold changes were absorbed by barns over time —all without making the barn look much different to passers by. Even the simple addition of owl holes allowed for access by barn owls to help control mice.

In time, eighty-foot barn and the hundred-foot barn were becoming less rare. But even those were small when compared to the entire farm. But no matter the changes in size and design, farms and barns still evoke a sense of tradition and connection to the land and our community.

WOOD SPECIES: Spruce (Red and Black), Hemlock.

COMMON SIZES: 3-4” x 8-12” x 20’+

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS: Weathered brown rough-sawn face in raw salvaged form. Light brown and even grain with frequent knots.

BACKGROUND: As a symbol of the 19th and early 20th c. immigrant experience, nothing may represent it more than a tenement house, the multi-family brick walk-up buildings that are found in New York City. They were cheap quick housing for the masses arriving into the city. And their inner bones are old growth lumber.

Tenements conjure the experience of our grandparents, if not their actual experience, then at least their sacrifices. Millions were jammed into the, dark, crowded tenements, without light, air, and indoor plumbing. The apartments on the top floors were the cheapest, but were also the hottest and the coldest on account of being directly under the exposed black tar roof in the era before wall and attic insulation.

Reform laws through the late 1800’s and the Tenement House Act of 1901 brought many improvements to benefit their health and safety for occupants. Public concern about New York tenements was raised by the Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890), a time when New York was the most densely populated city in the world. Today, most tenements have been given a modern makeover and are occupied by a fraction of the residents (at a hundred times the rent). And they’ve even seen the return of many great-grandchildren of the early occupants.

There was a huge lumber yard on 14th St. near the East River that provided material for many tenements. Most NYC are framed with 3-4” x 8-12” x 20-22’ wood joists, conforming to the scale of a standard NY city lot and block. Typically, Spruce or occasionally Hemlock lumber was used as framing material. It came from back wood logging operations in New England and Canada, where felled and de-limbed trees were pulled by ox or horse to a river and sent to a mill in Bangor, ME or New Brunswick in preparation for embarking to the city, a place paradoxically reflecting the rich diversity of a fertile old growth forest.

Spruce is light, strong and plentiful in the Northeast, and therefore ideal for tenements. The tree was originally passed over by early 19th c. loggers fixed on the prize of towering Eastern White Pine. But lumber companies happily doubled back a half century later to harvest the growing demand for everyday Spruce, a smaller tree (80-100’), but well proportioned for the joist spans needed. And it’s knotty figure and pale even-grain reflected the less refined honesty of the immigrant experience. The economy of Spruce was such that its use across the city was nearly exclusive for walk-up buildings. And by it’s connection with the “…wretched refuse, yearning to breath free”, captures the ideal of transformation and the magic of the democratic city.

The joists contained a “Fire-cut” on each end, allowing an individual member to fall out of the masonry wall during a fire without pulling the wall down. The 3-4” edges of the lumber have often experienced a few generations of nails, resulting from the replacement or re-securing of floors. Removal of the heavy nail pattern then results in a labor intensive process, like undoing a series of complex knots. Rust from the nail often bleeds into the surrounding wood fibers, leaving small dark holes and brushstroke like marks on the edges of a cleanly milled board.

 

 

 

Seaside boardwalks are usually built with wood, though increasingly made of concrete or pressure treated softwoods in response to concerns about the destructive harvesting and use of Rainforest woods. Reclaimed boardwalk woods are a limited but sustainable source of Ipe, Cumaru, Angelique and other S. American hardwoods. Boardwalks are found around the world, but are especially common in the New York and New Jersey area. The boardwalk woods reclaimed at Sawkill Lumber Co. have been recovered from three seaside walkways, Coney Island, Far Rockaway and Atlantic City.