I guess I have been making things out of wood for a living for a little over 30 years now. Most of it I have selected the clearest straitest boards that I could find at my supplier.
About 20 years ago I started turning a few things on a crummy little lathe. A few years later I bought a little less crummy lathe, and added a bigger motor, and about 500 lbs, and wider stance and started doing bigger and better work. About a year ago I built myself a lathe from parts I salvaged from the wrecking yard that I think had spent the previous 50 years in a railroad shop turning traincar wheels. It has a 4.5″ dia arbor, a 5hp motor, and variable frequentcy drive, and weighs 3000 lbs. I have to say that I am pretty happy with the results.
On Jan 21 of 1999, my shop studio was on the edge of the path of a tornado that tore through my neighborhood in a historic part of Little rock Ar. I bought my sawmill after that, and managed to salvage some large trees from that storm. I might add that wood is my only source for heating my shop for the last 20 years.
As the years pass, and the more I use trees that I am familiar with, or know the people that have lived with the trees that I have the good fortune of getting. Knowing the weather history etc. the more interesting I am finding the wood to be, and the more interested my clients are in my findings. I thought I would share a few stories with you, and you can share yours too. This may be something some of you may be missing that could expand your base of knowledge, or interest.
Most of my clients consider me an artist, so I like to think that I am layering my art on top of history. I’ll start with one of my first tree finds tonight, and maybe one of my last, and if you want to hear more, that can follow, otherwise get your eggs, and rotten tomatoes ready.
One of the first trees that caught me, I found in the back of a cove on L. Ouchita. I was gathering campfire wood. We burned all the limbs that night, and I brought a four foot long chunk home which I turned aportion into a vessel on the lathe 7 years later. That night while I was all puffed up with pride, I was looking it over good, and came to realize that this may be the oldest wood that I had ever found locally. Out of curiosity, I counted the rings. There were about 500.( I know there are a lot of you out west who will think that is nothing, but by the time your kids are grown, it may be.)
Almost all of Arkansas had been logged at least once by 1920. Most of our forest now is fourth generation.
I started wondering how old one might expect to find wood around here, and remembered meeting a dendrochronologist ( a scientist who studies tree-rings relative to weather.) a few years earlier. I tracked him down, and ask if I gave him some of this wood would he share what he learned from it with me.
On the phone he told me that I surely must be mistaken, because he had been looking for the oldest trees in Ar. professionaly, and a rank amature couldn’t possibly trump him. As it turned out my tree added 150 years to the living chronologies for this part of the state, and one of his students did his masters thesis using my find as the core of his studies. I have spent many hours studying both of their chronologies and seeing how they relate to other trees that I have found since.
I got a tree about this time last year from the National Cemetery where all of the Union soldiers were buried in Arkansas. This tree had been hit by lightning 47 times, and had 96 unknown soldiers burried in its noon shade. I had done a couple of turnings out of it and started wondering ” that is significant, What am is missing here?” so I went back and wrote down the names from the headstones of the known soldiers. I haven’t traced them all, but one group was from the 32 Iowa infantry. They only fought one battle in Arkansas. The battle of Fourche Bayou, was fought on Sep 10 1863 the day that Little Rock fell to the Union. Five of these soldiers burried under this tree were either killed or wounded and died later. (During the Civil War, they didn’t have dog-tags. So when a battle was over the loosing army was in retreat if there were any survivors, thus the large number of unknowns.) this was a post oak 52″ Dia.
A little less than 2 months ago there was a big storm that crossed the southern tier of counties of Arkansas. One of the towns that was hit was Old Washington, which is one of the oldest towns in Arkansas. I have gotten several sarge trees from there. When the confederats pulled out of Little Rock, Old Washington became the Confederate Capital of Ar. I’m looking forward to combining some ot the wood from these trees together whenever they are dry enough to work.
And before that this is where Sam Houston, Daniel Boon and Jim Bowie laid plans to take Texas from Mexico. I’m just starting to reserch whatever I can find about each of the sites that I got trees from there. Are any of you doing anything like this?