[Granville-Hough] 7 Sep 2009 - Wood Use

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sun, 06 Sep 2009 07:52:50 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: WoodUse - 7 Sep 2009


Wood Use in SullivanÆs Hollow.

When I was born in 1922, everything in Smith County had been built from 
longleaf pine products: houses, bridges, rail fences, new posts for 
barbed wire and mesh fence, railroad ties, shingles for roofs, staves 
and stakes for hog-proof garden fences and stock enclosures, supports 
for houses. It was the termite proof wood for any contact with the 
ground. It provided lighter-wood for hot fires for cooking and heating. 
By the time I was 12 years old, every salable long-leaf pine tree had 
been cut and sent away to sawmills. What seven generations had depended 
on as the basic building material in the great migration across the 
South from SC to TX was gone. We had a great transition to make, and no 
one had a solution. Few understood the total problem.
By the time I was 15, fence posts were giving way, wooden roof shingles 
had to be replaced, picket fences disappeared, and people were beginning 
to steal any remnants of longleaf pine logs away from the unfenced 
cut-over lands. When we needed new fence posts, we went to where we knew 
the last stands had been in Simpson County; and we spent a few days 
taking the old tops of trees, cutting them to size, and taking them to 
where we needed them back in Smith County as posts. We also took the old 
posts which had rotted out and turned them upside down. That gave us 
about five more years. I tried setting out black locusts, but they did 
not thrive in the sandy soil. My brother Clifford finally solved the 
problem with cattle proof electrically charged fences.
I have heard people say that any old buildings, fences, etc where were 
still standing were demolished by Hurricane Camille in 1969. But the 
days of the longleaf pine were over and we had started a new way of life 
by 1930. We just did not know it.
In the earlier days, my father had depended on the open range for 
livestock grazing; and on pine mast (longleaf pine seed) for fattening 
his hogs. The seed was heavy and oily, but it had a wing which would 
flutter it along for a quarter of a mile. Hogs could smell the seeds and 
devoured them. It was said that hogs fattened on pine mast had a 
distinctive turpentine-like taste. That was before my time. My father 
also worked with Uncle Sing Ainsworth and the Arender great uncles 
splitting staves, shingles, and stakes. The old fro he used was in our 
shop. A fro is intentionally dull so it will split the bolt and not cut 
into it. So, ôdull as a froö was a term we learned to use well. You 
placed the fro on the bolt of longleaf pine and hit it with a wooden 
mallet and yanked the handle to start the splitting. A fast couple could 
make a little money, but not much. The fro would not work on woods which 
did not split easily, or on woods with any knots.
Of course, our kindling wood was some remnant of longleaf pine until we 
had to get other woods very dry in a woodshed and use them for kindling. 
This longleaf pine wood was universally called ôLyteÆardö a contraction 
for lighter-wood, meaning wood used for light at night as a lantern. 
Once a fire was going, we could add sticks of oak, loblolly pine (second 
growth), hickory, or most any wood which did not pop and snap as it 
burned. We of course had to cut this firewood and stovewood from 
standing timber. Oak and hickory were our preferred fireplace woods, but 
my mother preferred pine for stovewood and cooking. We also used pine 
wood for cooking cane juice into molasses.
Cutting timber was dangerous work, and almost every year some young 
person would be killed because he stood in the wrong place or he did not 
know how to fell a tree. You first notched the tree on the side where 
you wanted it to fall, then you began cutting the other side. As soon as 
you could, you placed a wedge in the crack behind the saw and pounded it 
until the whole tree leaned enough to free the saw. We eventually got an 
iron wedge, but at first we used wedges made of hickory or of persimmon. 
Hickory would tend to split under pressure, but persimmon did not. So 
the persimmon tree had a special use as a wedge. You also had to use a 
wedge if the felled tree pinced as you cut it into proper lengths for 
stovewood or firewood. (About standing in the wrong place, it seems some 
people had an instinct for it. Maybe they were suicidal. My brother 
Roland was one of those persons. When we started wedging a tree to fell 
it we always put Roland in a safe place and made him stay there. This 
may have been the reason that Roland would not fell trees for firewood 
when he grew up to be in charge. He would go to local sawmills and buy 
the discarded slabs which he would then cut up. That was OK and it was 
safer. My idea of cutting the defective trees and leaving the good ones 
as timber did not appeal to Roland. He was like a share-cropper in that 
respect. He wanted everything here and now.)
When we were cutting pine trees, the resin got sticky on the cross-cut 
saw and we had to use kerosene to remove it. We placed our kerosene in a 
handy bottle and inserted green longleaf pine needles to cap the bottle. 
Then you could swing the bottle and get a spray of kerosene for the saw. 
Then you could continue with the sawing. During the Depression, there 
was a flury of making decorative baskets with longleaf pine needles, 
then allowing them to dry. They only lasted a few months, but everyone 
tried making them. Eventually, we had no more longleaf pine trees growing.
The most versatile wood we used was hickory. I have already mentioned it 
was the preferred wood for curing meat in smoke houses and for fireplace 
ashes in making lye soap. We used the wood for any use where it took a 
lot of force. We cut the trees and split them for seasoning. Then we 
could make hoe, axe, and hammer handles, singletrees, doubletrees, plow 
stocks, yokes, wagon tongues, etc from them. Our working tools were the 
axe, saw, drawing knife, wood chisel, plane, and wood rasp.
Another wood of special use was in direct contact with moisture and 
earth. This was the casing for our wells down to the underground aquifer 
about 100 feet. This casing was typically ten inches by ten inches and 
was made of toopler gum, actually tupelo gum or wood of the tupelo tree. 
The town in Mississippi where Elvis Presley was born is named Tupelo for 
this tree or wood. Cypress was actually better for casing, but it was 
too expensive. A good tupelo gum casing would last about 20 years.
One of our oaks was a whiteoak known locally as basket oak. It split 
fairly easily so that its slabs could be boiled or steamed until they 
could be bent to the shape of a basket. Then you wove the support slabs 
and anchored them in the right shape while you inserted the filler slabs 
round and round until you had the basket complete, then you had to make 
a handle around the top of the basket and tie it in place with small 
slabs of the oak. It was said that Uncle Ligie could make baskets but I 
cannot recall seeing him do it. They were astonishingly cheap 
considering the work involved in building one. We just bought them in 
Magee or Mize. We could also use basket oak to make chair bottoms. IÆm 
pretty sure we repaired some chairs but never made them from start. I 
believe Uncle Elijah had done the original work.
I did get to see special use made of red oak bark when brother Dueward 
got into cow-hide tanning for a couple of years. What you got from 
boiling red oak bark was a reddish mixture of dilute tannic acid. You 
used this boiling mixture to remove the hair and bits of dried flesh 
from the sides of the hide and after soaking some more and reworking 
over and over, you got nice reddish leather with a good smell. When it 
dried out, you could cut it up into shoe strings, harness lines, or 
whatever leather pieces you needed. Once I made several chair bottoms 
from partially tanned leather and got them ready to be used, tied nice 
and taut to the chair. Then you were supposed to sit in the chair so it 
would shape to your bottom. Our trouble was that we were too light to 
make the desired impression, and the chairs remained taut and hard. The 
chairs got banished to the back porch for the cats.
To keep down rodents, snakes, and insects, the old yards did not have 
grass but were kept clean by sweeping the ground with a dogwood bush 
broom. Only after we got tools for cutting grass did we abandon the 
clean ground yard. For the inside of the house we had two essential 
cleaning tools, one made of broom sedge carefully tied together for 
sweeping. There were two kinds of sedge which grew in old fields and 
along fence rows. One was broom sedge and the other was red sedge. The 
red sedge broke into pieces and made a mess, while the broom sedge 
worked fine. I once gathered the wrong kind of sedge, and got a thorough 
orientation into selecting the right kind. After that, I carefully noted 
where all the correct sedge grew. The other tool for house cleaning was 
the corn-shuck scrubbing broom. We made the scrubbing brooms by taking a 
piece of hickory about two by four size and 18 inches in length, then 
drilling holes about three inches apart big enough to insert shucks as 
tightly as we could. We attached a hoe handle to the center so we did 
not have to bend over. Then we would wet the floor, use some lye soap, 
and begin scrubbing with the scrubber. It cleaned up everything so we 
could work the dirty water over to the drain hole we had in each room. 
If the shucks wore out, we just added new ones.
We allowed sassafras to grow on ditch banks or roadside cuts so we could 
have ready access to the long roots. One of the great treats of a cold 
day at work was to have a hot cup of molasses-sweetened sassafras tea. 
We just washed the roots and cut them into suitable lengths for a pot, 
put in some clean water and boiled. When we had a good reddish color, we 
added molasses and boiled some more and drank it as hot as we could.
One of the features of old homesteads was the presence of walnut trees. 
The walnut is not native to Southern Mississippi, so must have been 
introduced for some purpose. Hickory nuts and pecans were easier to 
crack and eat if they were for food. Finally, one day Grandma Mary 
Richardson demonstrated why she had walnut trees. When the walnuts were 
still green, or their hulls were still green balls, she got several and 
cracked them pretty well with a hammer and put them into a washpot of 
water which she brought to a boil. Then she put some faded white clothes 
in the pot and continued the boiling for some time. The faded white 
clothes were dark and ugly when she hung them up to dry. When they were 
completely dry, they were a nice soft brown. This was the way, she said, 
to dye wool to a nice brown. So green fruit of the walnut trees were 
used to dye wool which had been woven into cloth, and that is one reason 
why old homesteads had walnut trees.
My father knew the uses for trees that only grew in the swamps of Big 
and Little Cohay, and he would sometimes mention them. Some may remain 
there to this day, with special uses long forgotten. Wood Use, 30 Jul 2005.